Duncan Greive interviews Steve Braunias on the occasion of his new book, The Scene of the Crime. Steve Braunias is my favourite New Zealand writer. Maybe that makes me an imbecile, I don’t know. I haven’t read hardly any of our fiction, because I barely read fiction. There might be better people out there in other … Read more
Helen Clark and the media: it’s like a thesis subject. She cowed them, bossed them, milked them. How did she get away with it? Extracts from Helen Clark: Inside Stories by Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon explore the phenomenon, with views from Clark’s former media advisor and (authorised) biographer Brian Edwards and journalist and … Read more
Sue Orr reviews the work of poet Bill Manhire, a sprawling effort covering themes as diverse as animal rights and personal identity. It’s a thing writers often do, when they get a new book by a fellow author. They flick to the dedication page, curious for the identity of the wing-person who endured years (probably) … Read more
Long Range Forecast (for Paula Green at 60) September and still winter but the purple irises are out under the vine and suddenly every branch and twig of the plum is pricked with blossom. This is an oath sworn by the season hand on heart. It’s in the sky too between showers. The … Read more
‘There was a mistake made on the day I was born, when I come to think of it,’ begins the narrator of Sweet Caress, Amory Clay, recalling how her father put her down in the birth notices as a boy. ‘Why did he say “son”? To spite his wife, my mother? Or was it a … Read more
Charlotte Grimshaw examines anonymous literary sensation Elena Ferrante, and the place of the ‘self’ in written work. I,I,I… Some time after the Christchurch earthquake, I visited the city. I hadn’t been there since before the disaster, and I was shocked by the devastation in the centre, and in particular by the number of multi-storey buildings that … Read more
The novel that won this year’s Man Booker Prize runs 688 pages. Peter Simpson gets stuck in. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James There is a scene in Marlon James’ vast, grim, dark, compelling, and (now) Man Booker prize winning novel, that threw me back more than 40 years to my only first-hand … Read more
In July 1965 Sam and Ann Lawson, who had been undergoing fertility treatment, gave birth to the world’s third surviving set of quintuplets at Aucklands’ National Women’s Hospital. The crowd went wild. Paul Little’s fascinating book Stolen Lives: The Untold Stories of the Lawson Quins picks up the story… Sam and Ann were in more … Read more
Death called by (I.M. Glenn Jowitt) Death called by the other day – no one was home at the time. A note, ‘Sorry I missed you’, stuck under the front door mat. I’m sorry I missed him too. I would have asked him on in, told him to kick off his boots … Read more
Wild Roads: A New Zealand Journey by Bruce Ansley We live in a mad landscape linked to each other by mad roads. Ask any tourist upside-down in a drainage ditch. For us, though, those roads are simply local wonders, and that’s just what Bruce Ansley suggests pretty much all the way through his excellent new … Read more
The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, by Frederick Forsyth Frederick Forsyth, alliterative rather than literary genius, father of the jet-age airport novel, has influenced a couple of generations of dreamers. One who immediately springs to mind is former ACT MP David Garrett, who was so intrigued by Forsyth’s description of identity theft in The Day … Read more
Purity, by Jonathan Franzen ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Given how routinely Jonathan Franzen is now compared to Tolstoy it’s easy to imagine the iconic opening line of Anna Karenina speaking to a younger Franzen as a kind of career modus operandi. True, his first … Read more
Reckless: My Life by Chrissie Hynde A single comment from Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde has overshadowed everything about her memoir. In an interview with the Times, she said that she took the blame for being the victim of a sexual assault. She describes the incident in her book. Hynde was 21, on Quaaludes, and alone … Read more
“Bullrush,” says Josh Kronfeld, “is rugby without the ball.” David Slack pays tribute to the sport without a point in his warm and wonderfully entertaining book Bullrush!: A Celebration of the Great New Zealand Game. The finest game of Bullrush you will ever see is three and half minutes long and you will find it … Read more
Action lines I’d thought we would go up as those bright inflatable men that ripple in car yards jack-knifing from the waist, then up with the flags. I’d thought we’d go up easy, actions lines coming out of us. Now I know leaving will take more effort. We blow up the air dancer by … Read more
For some reason children’s authors often seem to get treated a little like small children themselves. Even so, I did a double-take when I read the invitation instructions for the Book Awards after-party at Government House: “You are invited for post-award drinks in the house at 6.36pm. Departure time will be at 7.10pm.” “It’s not … Read more
Whatever happened to Guy Somerset? As long-serving books editor of the Listener, he was a knowledgeable, alert presence on the literary scene. He fled the magazine a year or so ago and has fished up as PR trout – actually, contents editor – for the New Zealand Festival, in Wellington. He’s continuing to apply his keen … Read more
Bernard Beckett was on the judging panel that awarded the 2013 NZ Post children’s book award to Into the River – the Ted Dawe’ novel which was banned this week by weird Christian sect, the Film and Literature Board of Review. UPDATE: Into the River is no longer banned or even classified at all. This … Read more
Now and again, not often, a novel and a novelist comes along and knocks everyone on their ass. It’s happening with Elena Ferrante and it’s happening with Hanya Yanagihara, the New York writer whose novel A Little Life has mesmerized readers with its story telling and its ability to harrow. It’s shortlisted for the Man … Read more
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota There’s this, taken from Cameron Crowe’s story in Rolling Stone, January 13, 1977: Bob Marley, one of the world’s best-known reggae performers, and three other persons were shot December 3rd when seven gunmen burst onto the grounds of … Read more
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma Satin Island – Tom McCarthy’s second novel shortlisted for the Man Booker award – is the story of U (that’s all we ever know of his name) and his work, as an anthropologist/corporate ethnographer, at the Company (that’s all we ever know of its name). … Read more
For a couple of years in the 1980s I had a wonderful part-time job – I taught two 7th form English classes at a Catholic High School and was paid an extra four hours a week to be teacher librarian. I went to the bookshop with someone else’s wallet. I bought The World According to … Read more
Six typewriters To begin with, my father’s reconditioned German keyboard picked up during the war, with a spiky Gothic ‘o’. Then, I suppose, when I was married, the use of Alistair’s: details forgotten or repressed. In Dunedin I answered a small ad and paid £10 for a museum piece black and upright … Read more
Patrick Evans’s last novel was about Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame – a clever piece of ventriloquism in which the Sargeson voice and character are accurately caught. This new novel takes the theme, or subject, or obsession, one stage further and beyond ‘the facts’. New Zealand (Canterbury) novelist Raymond Thomas Lawrence has won the Nobel … Read more
An occasional series in which we feature an insight or proverb from In the Arena (Penguin Random House, $40), the new book by entrepreneur Diane Foreman and her ghost writer Jenni McManus. On seasoned entrepreneurs: In the Arena, by Diane Foreman with Jenni … Read more
An occasional series in which we feature an insight or proverb from In the Arena (Penguin Random House, $40), the new book by entrepreneur Diane Foreman and her ghost writer Jenni McManus. On Paul Henry’s wisdom: In the Arena, by Diane Foreman with Jenni McManus is published by Penguin Random House, RRP $40
Has Paul McCartney ever said anything interesting? Sometimes? Now and then? A couple of times? Once? No. Rock’s most distinguished bore has always chuntered on, yapping and jawing, blathering and babbling, the words pouring out of him like water through a seive. Nothing ever holds. It’s a kind of disease, a neurological disorder. He needs … Read more
Now that the dust has settled on the weekend’s Tinderbox Children’s Writers and Illustrators conference in Wellington, time to ask: who are the most powerful people in children’s literature? Tricky thing, power. Are the most powerful people in the New Zealand children’s book world those that are recognised internationally as experts? Do they need to … Read more
