Search results for ""Te Herenga Waka University Press""

When the stars were rhinestones. When your car was a blue Holden god. When kisses spread to your back teeth, marathons of sucking. When we pashed through jokes, through tunes, through homework, through the leftovers we shovelled out our schoolbags. When you let me tattoo you with talk. Thirty-one exhilarating new stories from the acclaimed author of deleted scenes for lovers: ‘If Slaughter is writing from the black block in her chest, she is also speaking directly into yours.’—Charlotte Graham-McLay, New Zealand Books

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The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence.Avia addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope. The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning. As it holds history accountable, it rises in power.

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It’s 1994. Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches. They volunteer at the Salvation Army shop, and sometimes they sleep with men for money. They live with Heidi and Dell, who are also like them. It’s 2006. Peggy and Greta have two jobs: a job at a call centre, and a job as a moderator for a website. They’re teaching themselves how to code. Heidi and Dell don’t live together anymore, and Dell keeps getting into trouble. One day, Peggy and Greta turn around and there’s only one of them. It’s 2018. Margaret lives next door to Heidi and her family. She has a job writing code that analyses data for a political organisation, and she’s good at it. Every day she checks an obsolete cellphone she found under her bed, waiting for messages. She struggles to stay sober. Then, one day, there are two of them again, both trying to figure out where they have come from. Nothing to See is a compelling, brilliantly original novel about life in the era of surveillance capitalism, when society prefers not to see those who are different, and the line between reality and simulation feels dissolvingly thin.

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Zum Bullshitter geht der Preis’ – so said the great German author-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). Or did he? Can we trust what we never quite knew about because we never quite got around to reading it in the first place? Is it safe to rely on what we overhear in the university common-room or even out there in the real world? And does it matter? In Bluffworld we are taken through the bildung of a master-bluffer, from his early days spent plagiarising student essays to his magisterial later lectures on the opening sentence of Moby-Dick and other works he’s been led to believe might well be great literature, whatever that is. We learn to spot the difference between bullshit and horseshit, to understand the power of seeming, to use ‘Quite’ and ‘Just so’ to trigger verbal smokescreens when outflanked, to sense the sublime power of unoriginality all around us. Finally, we see the inevitable terminus ad quem (whatever that means) of the Meister-Bullshit-Künstler(?), as our hero confronts the apotheosis of bullshit in the bewildering word-world of the corporate university. All this and much, much less! Time for another all-staff barbecue!

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Denis Glover wrote New Zealand's most famous poem, yet his work has fallen in and out of print over the years. First published in 1995, Bill Manhire's selection is based on Glover's own 1981 Selected Poems, and includes `The Magpies' along with a wide variety of other poems, lyrical and satirical. It reveals a richer and far more lively writer than the one usually found in anthologies. Printer, typographer, publisher, boxer, sailor, scholar, satirist, wit and poet, Denis Glover was born in Dunedin in 1912 and died in Wellington in 1980. He founded the Caxton Press in 1936 and published much important New Zealand writing. Bill Manhire is himself one of New Zealand's most celebrated poets. He has written widely on New Zealand literature and edited many celebrated anthologies.

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Presenting thirty-five stories from seven collections published over more than forty years, Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Stories is a milestone in the career of one of New Zealand’s leading writers. `Vincent O’Sullivan’s short fictions go straight to the heart of human experience. They are by turn tender, deeply moving, unsparing and often witty, endowed with a sly humour that cuts through his characters’ foibles and pretensions. He is simply one of our very best storytellers, with total mastery of his craft.’—Fiona Kidman `These finely attuned, wry and deeply moving stories that have been gathered together here are executed with such compassion and grace that we might not even be aware at the time of our reading just how much they have taught us about what it is to be human and frail in this large world.’—Kirsty Gunn `Vincent O’Sullivan ranks with the best worldwide. His stories are as fine as any being written today.’—Kevin Ireland

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The Ice Shelf:  an eco-comedy On the eve of flying to Antarctica to take up an arts fellowship, thirty-something Janice, recently separated, has a long night of remembrance, regret and realisation as she goes about the city looking for a friend to take care of her fridge while she’s away. En route she discards section after section of her novel in the spirit of editing until there is nothing left to edit. The Ice Shelf, a novel written as Acknowledgements, is an allegory for the dangers of wasting love and other non-renewable resources. Cover illustration: Ant Sang

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In her arresting new book, Kerrin P. Sharpe raises her voice to address with passion and urgency the political, moral and ecological injustices of the world today.

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Early in his career, New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins was described by fellow artist Giovanni Intra as a ‘tourist of photography’. This epithet has been used repeatedly by commentators on Hipkins’ work to describe two intertwined aspects of his practice. As art historian Peter Brunt puts it, Hipkins is a constantly travelling photographer, ‘an iconographer of desire, travel, time and … modern communities’, and a tourist within the medium, ‘a great manipulator of the photographic artifact itself’.Accompanying a major survey of Hipkins’ work at The Dowse Art Museum (November 2017 – March 2018), The Domain is an extensively illustrated book that combines new essays with a selection of art writing from the past 20 years. It illuminates not only Hipkins’ ever-evolving practice – which takes in a great variety of photographic media, from slide transparencies to moving image – but critical approaches to photography at the turn of the 21st century. Included here are plates from major bodies of work including The Habitat (1999–2000), Hipkins’ study of Brutalist architecture on New Zealand universities; The Homely (1997–2000), a photographic tour through New Zealand and Australia, nominated for the inaugural Walters Prize; The Colony (2000–2002), shown at the 28th Sao Paulo Biennale; and Erewhon (2014), Hipkins’ first feature-length film, an experimental adaptation of Samuel Butler’s anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon. Hipkins’ work returns again and again to a set of core concerns: photography as the predominant form of modernist visual communication; the nation state and national identity; exploration and colonisation in the modern era; and how social and political ideologies visually shape the world we live in. Here, followers of Hipkins can see how his career has unfolded and newcomers can discover one of New Zealand’s most innovative, subversive investigators of photography.With new essays by George Clark, Courtney Johnston and Robert Leonard, and archival texts by Barbara Blake, Peter Brunt, Blair French, Heather Galbraith, Giovanni Intra, Robert Leonard, Trevor Mahovsky, William McAloon, Karra Rees and Laurence Simmons.

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In a series of backroom negotiations in 1956, the National Government and Labour Opposition agreed to put aside adversarial politics temporarily and entrench certain significant electoral rules. For any of these rules to be amended or repealed, Section 189 of the Electoral Act (now Section 268 of the 1993 Act) requires the approval of either three-quarters of all MPs or a majority of electors voting in a referendum. The MPs believed this entrenchment put in place a 'moral' constraint to guide future parliaments - but its status has changed over time. In Search of Consensus tells the story of why and how such a remarkable political settlement happened. It traces and analyses the Act's protected provisions, subsequent fortunes and enduring legacy. As such, it is an important contribution to understanding the contemporary constitution and political culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. Contents 1 The ''Remarkable' Electoral Act 1956 2 New Zealand's Constitution in the 1950s 3 Politics and Government in the 1950s 4 The Unsettled Electoral Issues 5 The Making of the Electoral Act 1956 6 Entrenchment 7 The Reserved Provisions: Justifications and Evolution 8 The Electoral Act 1956 and Constitutional Evolution in Aotearoa New Zealand Elizabeth McLeay is a political scientist who has published extensively on New Zealand and comparative politics and government. Her books include: The Cabinet and Political Power in New Zealand (Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1995); with Jonathan Boston, Stephen Levine and Nigel S. Roberts, New Zealand Under MMP: A New Politics? (Auckland University Press/Bridget Williams Books, Auckland, 1996); with Kate McMillan and John Leslie, eds., Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2009); and with Claudia Geiringer and Polly Higbee, What's the Hurry? Urgency in the New Zealand Legislative Process 1987-2010 (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2011). Formerly a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, Elizabeth has received many awards and fellowships.

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Designed to ensure the Antarctic is maintained exclusively for peaceful purposes, the Antarctic Treaty system has evolved to encourage high standards of environmental protection and the sustainable management of living resources. This book sheds light on the challenges the Antarctic Treaty system has faced and overcome.

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In April 1938 Agnes Moncrieff, in her role as the YWCA of New Zealand's foreign secretary to the YWCA of China, wrote to her mother, 'You do not travel in China at the full moon if you can help. There are always air raids.' Nessie, as she preferred to be called, was an indomitable spirit and source of strength for many women in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. There from 1930–1945, she is the only New Zealander to ever be seconded to the YWCA of China. These fascinating excerpts drawn from hundreds of her typed and handwritten letters tell of a remarkable woman, her experiences living and working in China, her observations of Chinese and Japanese military strategies, and her horror at what was taking place around her.

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China and the Pacific: The View from Oceania is based on a conference held at the National University of Samoa in Apia from 25 to 27 February 2015. China's new role as an important diplomatic and economic partner of the island countries of the Pacific has attracted increasing attention, and some controversy, in recent years. The unique priority of this conference in Samoa was to give full opportunity for both Pacific voices to be heard on the subject and for productive engagement and discussion between Pacific island participants and those from China. Samoa's Prime Minister, China's Ambassador to Samoa, and leading politicians and academics from all around the Pacific islands region made contributions which are included in this book. Topics covered include: Changing Geopolitics: Is China replacing traditional partners? Regional Security: How has China changed regional security? Chinese in the Pacific: What is the role of Chinese communities in the region? Development Cooperation: New opportunities and also a new aid environment? Trade and Investment: What opportunities - and what challenges - have come with China's increasing economic engagement? The conference was jointly sponsored by the National University of Samoa, the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, and Sun Yat-sen Univesity of Guangzhou.

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Creamy Psychology surveys Yvonne Todd’s work since the late 1990s, including her recent Gilbert Melrose project and her latest photographic series Ethical Minorities (Vegans). It contains new essays by Todd herself, Robert Leonard, Misha Kavka, Claire Regnault, Megan Dunn, and Anthony Byrt. It also contains an archival section with earlier essays, including key pieces by Leonard, Dunn, Justin Paton, and Justin Clemens. Comprehensively illustrated, Creamy Psychology is the new goto book on Yvonne Todd.

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George Samuel Evans, barrister, editor, and politician, was a man of his time. A brilliant scholar with formidable skills in both oratory and journalism, he was bred to pursue the goals of civil and religious liberty. His dissenting background and upbringing in his father's parish in East London led to his passion for reform. A zealous, hard-working advocate for parliamentary and colonial reform, his path led eventually to New Zealand, a colony of ragged uncertainty, ambition, rivalry, and deprivation.When Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the architect of the systematic colonization of New Zealand, virtually abandoned his project, it was Evans who took up the reins. He and a small band of others assured the scheme's continuation and, for better or worse, spurred a reluctant government into taking action to procure the country for the Crown. Although a permanent tribute to him exists in the name of Evans Bay in Wellington, today Evans has become little more than a footnote until now. Helen Riddiford's lively and extensively researched biography acknowledges his immense contribution to New Zealand and Australia and allows his voice to be heard once more.

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With more than 80 brilliant, disturbing, and compassionate images, this collection composes one of the great photographic portraits of this generation. Crisscrossing a complex urban landscape of Wellington in New Zealand, the artist demonstrates his love for the tender, sad, and often humorous details of life lived moment by moment on the streets of his hometown. The pictures reflect the years the author spent exploring the city, creating a definitive depiction of the famed capital. Typified by quirky observation and a rapid narrative, this endearing photographic essay captures the heart of New Zealand.

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Provides an absorbing insight into a century and a half of printing history. Beginning in the early 1860s when the first typographical unions were formed in Dunedin and Wellington, this history ends in 1996 when printers and journalists amalgamated with the Engineers Union to form NZ's largest private sector trade union.

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Memory Pieces is an intimate and evocative memoir in three parts. `Double Unit’ tells the story of Maurice Gee’s parents – Lyndahl Chapple Gee, a talented writer who for reasons that become clear never went on with a writing career, and Len Gee, a boxer, builder, and man’s man. `Blind Road’ is Gee’s story up to the age of eighteen, when his apprenticeship as a writer began. `Running on the Stairs’ tells the story of Margaretha Garden, beginning in 1940, the year of her birth, when she travelled with her mother Greta from Nazi-sympathising Sweden to New Zealand, through to her meeting Maurice Gee when they were working together in the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1967. Design by Keely O’Shannessey

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Danyl McLauchlan wanted to get closer to the hidden truth of things. But it was starting to look like the hidden truth of things was that nothing was real, everything was suffering, and he didn't really exist. In these essays Danyl explores ideas and paths that he hopes will make him freer and happier - or, at least, less trapped, less medicated and less depressed. He stays at a monastery and meditates for eight hours a day. He spends time with members of a new global movement who try to figure out how to do the most possible good in the world. He reads forbiddingly complex papers on neuroscience and continental philosophy and shovels clay with a Buddhist monk until his hands bleed. He tries to catch a bus. Tranquillity and Ruin is a light-hearted contemplation of madness, uncertainty and doom. It's about how, despite everything we think we know about who we are, we can still be surprised by ourselves. 'McLauchlan is likely the most intelligent essayist in New Zealand . . . and this is likely to be the most thought-provoking book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2021.' -Steve Braunias, ReadingRoom

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I've decided to document my life in pictures. It's hard to draw the pole, because of the pole.Beth has a pole through her arms. This is not a metaphor. A metaphor would be a lot less inconvenient.On the other side of the room, Kenneth is creating a new religion. He thinks narrative is the operating principle of the universe. He also thinks he's the hero of Beth's story. Beth is worried he's going to leave her. The creatures living in the pole may have stolen her cat.Tara Black's comic is surreal, dark, sad, perversely joyful, and if you bet someone they couldn't find another book remotely like it, you would win. It's a little bit about being married to Kenneth. It's a little bit about losing your cat. It's definitely not about the pole.

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And how could she go on living between two worlds, one she knew and understood but could no longer be in, and another that she was in but was not permitted to know? Pregnant after rape, seventeen-year-old Josephina Hansen is exiled from her family home in Kiel in the north of Germany. She finds refuge with her sister’s Danish family in Sønderborg, then in Hamburg with a philanthropic businessman and, later, a radical journalist and his sister. In 1880 the worsening political situation forces this makeshift family into exile – and a new life in a small farming settlement in the Kaitīeke valley in New Zealand. Accompanying Josephina on the journey is an ancient sewing sampler given to her by her grandmother. In its lovingly stitched pictures she finds a way of mapping the world she has come from – and that is traversed by the birds of her childhood, the Rohrsänger or reed warblers, which migrate yearly from the salt marshes near her home to ‘somewhere nice and warm where the oranges grow’. Josephina’s story is framed by the reunion of Frank and Beth, descendants of two of her three children by different fathers. It is Beth’s discovery of the reason for the disappearance from the family story of Josephina’s third child that unlocks memory and meaning from the intricately stitched story of the migrating reed warblers. The Reed Warbler is a beautiful and rich family saga that weaves together the lives of six generations, overseen, as Josephina’s son Wolf would observe at a family reunion in 1915, by ‘Ma with that glint in her eye’. ‘Epic, engrossing and richly patterned, The Reed Warbler explores complex migrations: the way human lives move inexorably towards their futures while at the same time doubling back on their pasts. In tracing the story of Josephina and her family, Ian Wedde invites us to consider the threads that tether us to our own histories.’ —Catherine Chidgey

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The quivering luminosity of Islander is the rippling movement of the sea in sunlight, reflecting at once here, at once there, and then dissolving the distinctions. From Scotland to the Antipodes and back again, Davidson maps the prosaic alongside the sacred, inviting us into a gentle dissolution of place-based story, towards a more non-dual perspective of being in the world. This is the work of a cartographer of `ancient light’. —Em Strang, author of Bird-Woman, winner of the 2017 Saltire Award for the Best Scottish Poetry Book of the Year The title poem of Islander is an essential definition: not rooted in landlocked blood and soil but connected by sea and distance, and the returning tides of Scotland, the archipelagos of New Zealand and the islands of Oceania. Here is a poet never given to the common gestures of banal defiance but simply slipping away from the traps of rigidity and subscription, attuned to the ancient laws of movement and sensitive to the uncertainties, the vulnerable truths. `Interislander’ takes a specific urgency, a man suffering a heart attack on the ferry between the North Island and the South Island: practicalities and actions demanded of the moment are deftly depicted but the human place in our unfinished history is there between the sea beneath and the enveloping sky above. `The Desert Road’ crosses the country, mapped by co-ordinate points, listening as the darkness falls and languages come out in constellations, leading through the wilderness to strange, `familiar places’. `The inbreath’ takes us to Ardbeg and another waterside with slipstreams and shipping lanes, snow in the mouth and Scotland as no more nor less than another harbour of perception. Lynn Davidson is a poet opening such perceptions and sensitivities, singular, sometimes wittily anecdotal, poised upon latent gravity, eluding both flippancy and weight in a collection that slows time and repays patience with tempered inductions to particular, opening perspectives. —Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow

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First published in 1987 and reissued for the first time, In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot restores an essential New Zealand writer to new generations of readers. In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot begins with Texidor's most fully achieved piece of work, These Dark Glasses. Distinguished by sophisticated writing and acute psychological insight, it is set on the south coast of France during the Spanish Civil War. The stories which follow range from Spain and England to New Zealand, where she writes unsentimentally and unerringly of the environment of the time. Goodbye Forever, the unfinished novel which concludes the volume, is Texidor's most sustained piece of writing on New Zealand. The central character, Lili, is a Viennese refugee who arrives amongst the writers of Auckland's North Shore. She is exotic and alone, and her slow collapse is plotted with minute observation.

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Twenty-nine years after it was published, VUP are proud to re-issue Barbara Anderson's first novel. It's a new term at the girl's high school and in the staffroom and classes life is beginning again. For Carmen, Sooze, Margot and the rest of Barbara Anderson's wonderfully memorable characters, it's a time to reflect on the often hilariously conflicting demands of lovers, supervisors, friends and enemies. Here is a novel whose razor-sharp dialogue, wit and compassion reveal a writer of prodigious gifts. `If Jane Austen had been able to read Virginia Woolf, she would have gone on to write something like Girls High ... A moving story of how people mature, it's a joy to read.' - The Daily Mail `She has a gift for shrewd observation, acerbic comment and clever comedy which moves easily from near slapstick to subtle wit.' - David Eggleton, Otago Daily Times `The prose of Barbara Anderson prods, darts, dazzles on the page. Girls High, her first novel, is thrilling to read.' - Mary Varnham, New Zealand Listener

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Layering comedy over insight over rue and pathos over comedy [...]

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In the late 1960s New Zealand’s industrial relations entered the most turbulent era in its history. The following three decades witnessed the decline and eventual repeal of the arbitration system which had dominated industrial relations since 1894 and culminated with the enactment of the neo-liberal Employment Contracts Act in 1991. It was not until a decade later that the Employment Relations Act 2000 provided a broad agreement on the regulation of labour relations, resulting in almost two decades of relative stability. Transforming Workplace Relations reflects on this revolution and speculates on the future of work relationships in a world challenged by newly evolving forms of work and employment. Contributors include both those who lived through the last 40 years as well as those who, in another 40 years, may again look back over a much changed employment landscape. This collection marks the 40th anniversary of the inaugural publication in May 1976 of New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations, a journal which continues to provide a multi-disciplinary commentary and analysis of the changes impacting the lives of working New Zealanders and their employers.

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How did New Zealand writers make nationalism out of modernism? What did the process owe to a revolution in sexuality? And what did this mean for writing by women as the 1920s gave way to the 1930s?Writing as a poet as well as a historian, as a critic of ideology, and as a self-confessed fan of the nationalist legacy, John Newton tackles these intriguing questions with warmth, insight and critical precision. The first part of an ambitious trilogy, Hard Frost shows us a fresh way of looking at New Zealand literature of the 20th century. It details the pleasures of essential texts. It also roams far and wide through their contexts: from mountaineering to moa excavation, from beauty pageants to the history of psychoanalysis. In readings of such foundational authors as Mansfield, Sargeson, Curnow and Hyde, Hard Frost proposes that our literary history is not just a story about books but a forgotten history of feelings. We know these writers well, yet they have so much still to tell us. This lucidly argued work will change the way we understand them.

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James Prendergast is the most infamous figure in New Zealand's legal history, known mainly for his condemnation of the Treaty of Waitangi as ""a simple nullity"" in 1877. But during his lifetime Prendergast was a highly respected lawyer and judge. He was arguably New Zealand's dominant legal professional from 1865 to 1899, and his good reputation remained intact until the 1980s, when the Treaty of Waitangi finally returned to the centre of New Zealand political life. The more the Treaty has been celebrated, the more Prendergast has been condemned. Who was this legal villain? Was he really a villain at all? This comprehensive biography charts Prendergast's life from his upbringing in the heart of London's legal world through to his long and eventful reign as New Zealand's third Chief Justice. It provides fascinating insights into different parts of the 19th-century British Empire and, in particular, colonial Wellington, featuring bitter feuds, groundbreaking judgments, and personal tragedy.

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Little Frank, a 120-year-old gangster who traded his imagination for a secure and long life, is the protagonist in this dark and dazzling novel set in an all-too-plausible near future. As the leader of a notorious gang, Little Frank is trapped in a luxurious life of mindless routine when he is suddenly jolted awake in the year 2090 to the bizarre facts of his current existence. Little Frank must now race to rebuild his memory and make sense of his new reality in this rich and complex work of science fiction.

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Simone’s obsession with her former lover is dangerously out of control, and the approach of her 40th birthday compels her to wreak havoc in his new life. A house-sitting opportunity at a remote beach provides a welcome escape. With only the responsibilities of somebody else’s perpetually cheerful dog, Simone values her isolation; her elderly neighbors, however, have different ideas and begin to pull her into their eccentric lives. Is it possible she’s gotten away with it, or will the things she’s done come back to haunt her? This moving novel explores the possibility of reinvention, the bittersweet taste of revenge, and a woman’s search for friendship and love.

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Featuring brilliant urban photography, this celebration of the dynamic presence of sculpture in Wellington vividly captures more than 40 sculptures throughout the city’s streets and parks. An informative and provocative examination of the sculptures' origins, this collection shows how many of the gorgeous art works came into being due to the shared vision of individuals, government agencies, and corporations who value the relationship of art and city, to brighten the lives of its citizens. The result is both a visual feast and a unique record of the 21st-century city’s fabric—sure to be treasured by travelers, art enthusiasts, and locals alike.

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Each of these three plays takes as its kernel a news story from the past that captured the imagination of New Zealanders. In Horseplay novelist Ronald Hugh Morrieson and poet James K. Baxter meet and share the stage with the rear end of a horse, while in Flipside four sailors confront the elements for 119 days, adrift on the overturned boat Rose-Noëlle. Finally, Trick of the Light revisits the infamous Crewe murders when a brother and sister bring their mother's ashes to a motel room that hasn't been opened in three decades.

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Comprising stories from other volumes as well as never-before-published tales, this collection of short stories mixes wit with warmth. Anderson's rich characters are set against a range of locations and time periods, from New Zealand's country farms of the mid-20th century to contemporary hair salons and everything in between.

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A science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger’s party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mic night.Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.

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Sam Duckor Jones’s first poetry collection was a tour of small towns, overgrown lawns, and giant clay men. In Party Legend he turns once again to questions of existence but at an even bigger scale. These are poems about creation, God, intimacy, the surreality of political rhetoric, misunderstandings at the supermarket – and they are fearless in form and address. Though Party Legend is often wildly funny, it is also, in its Duckor-Jonesian way, tender-hearted and consoling.

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Phil Lester’s first book, The Vulgar Wasp, was about one of the world’s most hated insects. His second is about just the opposite - the honey bee, arguably one of our best-loved six-legged creatures. People have revered honey bees for centuries. Today we celebrate them with toys, postage stamps and campaigns to raise awareness; we dress up in large bee suits to protest the use of pesticides; we’ve even sent bees into space and watched as they adjusted to microgravity.Bees are one of the world’s most efficient pollinators. Their work is vital to the success of many food crops, and hence to the world’s economy. So we need to take seriously any threats to their health - including parasites, pathogens, predators and pesticides - and, guided by evidence at every turn, find a way to minimise harm and keep bees thriving. As Healthy Bee, Sick Bee shows, this is no small task.In this book, entomologist Phil Lester explores the wonderfully complex and sometimes brutally efficient life history of honey bees, and the problems they face in New Zealand and around the globe. What causes a beehive to collapse? Are pesticides as big a problem as they appear? What can we do to improve the health?

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The dead should come back changed, or what’s the point? Why do you hide your head beneath the bedclothes? Doesn’t everyone name themselves? Is your house a bottle? Are you trapped in there? Isn’t it nice to be this close to someone? Can we go back to our notes? Please? Urgent, witty and unnervingly beautiful, Oscar Upperton’s first collection takes familiar language and makes it uncanny. Suns detach. The ocean climbs a mast. Someone forgets where their haunted house is. These poems are vitally human and consoling; they reframe the ordinary as something to yearn for.

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A young father high on Ritalin longs to leap into the tiger enclosure. A teacher who has been stood down for accessing porn on a school computer wants to re-establish contact with his teenage daughter. A carer out on a day trip is desperate to find a working toilet for his adult charge. What Sort of Man is a potent collection of stories that goes head to head with the crisis of contemporary masculinity, and is as exhilarating as it is harrowing.

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At the centre of this book-length poem is a sister’s disappearance, and a peculiar inheritance: an obsession with pins. Pins held between the teeth to tell a fortune, a downpour of a thousand pins, precious pins borrowed for an art installation. In this intelligent, intimate and often comic depiction of two sisters and their family, Natalie Morrison gathers together many tiny pinpricks of loss. Part poem, part letter, part inventory – but not limited to any one of these categories – this is a mesmerising debut. ‘I found Pins extraordinarily witty, perceptive, and moving. The family narrative unspools around two sisters whose pointed obsessions bring us something that echoes Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and Anne Kennedy’s 100 Traditional Smiles.’ —James Brown

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`I know now that later in life I will write prose and good prose,' declared the nineteen-year-old James K. Baxter. And he did. The 2015 publication of Baxter's Complete Prose reveals his remarkable range and depth across everything from personal, informal jottings to highly crafted literary essays and political polemics. Quarrels with Himself provides a dozen essays that uncover how much more complicated Baxter is than his popular stereotype, and how his prose writing (like his poetry) wrestles with contradictions, anxieties and competing impulses just as he wrestled with the society in which he lived, or from which he withdrew. Essays by Janet Wilson, Sharon Matthews, Paul Millar, Lawrence Jones, John Davidson, Nicholas Wright, Hugh Roberts, Kirstine Moffat, Paul Morris, Doreen D'Cruz, Peter Whiteford, and Greg O'Brien, with an introduction by Geoffrey Miles.

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You part the fronds Plant Woman has arranged for you, creating a curious weft in the order of disclosure – like a generation that looks back to look forward – because those who cannot remember the pasta are condemned to reheat it. With his sixth poetry collection, highly rated New Zealand poet James Brown is back to flood another chamber. `teeth and claws, poetic sensibility, and stimulating peculiarities’ —Elizabeth Knox on James Brown

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Six seminal plays from Ken Duncum and Rebecca Rodden, whose playwriting partnership powered the vibrant theatre scene round Wellington’s BATS Theatre in the 1980s and 90s. Boldly inventive, darkly comic and ceaselessly imaginative, the plays collected here present a chilling one-woman vision of alienation (Polythene Pam); the comic and tragic impossibility of human connection (Truelove); an irresponsible punk couple horrified to find they’ve become parents to the Messiah (Flybaby); conjoined twins plunged into an off-kilter world of rampant advertising, animal terrorism and a perfume made from monkey semen (cult-classic JISM); a real-life 20th-century martyr tested to his limits in the afterlife by a vengeful gang of defrocked saints (The Temptations of St Max); and the not-so-quiet desperation of a fearful hoarder fighting to survive the night hours (Panic!). Supporting the plays are introductions and selected images from the writers and other BATS practitioners which vividly recapture a crucial time and place in New Zealand’s theatre history.

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From early childhood in postwar Blenheim to the remote regions of Bangladesh, from an English boarding school to 1960s Auckland, and from Jordan during the civil war of 1969–70 to family homes full of children, this dazzling book traces the many shifts in Ian Wedde's life.Haunted by the ghosts of his restless German and Scottish great grandparents, and of his wandering parents, Wedde is always looking over his shoulder as he writes. His companion throughout is his twin brother Dave, who shared their first home—their mother Linda's womb—and who, as the book ends, hosts a lunch where the brothers raise their glasses to the transit lounges of their lives. Affectionate, funny, sad, analytical, but above all honest, The Grass Catcher is at once a moving personal memoir and an engaging and reflective essay on the nature of memory.

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Christopher Hare has done well for himself: one of the world’s top food writers, he has travelled to the best restaurants in the most exotic locations, accompanied by the chic dining companion known to readers of his lavish books as Thé Glacé. But when the credit crunch ushers in a new age of austerity, it’s uncertain whether his audience will still have an appetite for his thoughts on Robuchon and caramelized quail. Certainly Christopher’s editor has had his fill.One evening, as he explores the budget options in a mediocre restaurant in off-season Nice—alone, for Thé Glacé, his erstwhile wife Mary Pepper, has left him to find international fame and fortune as an art photographer of pornographically eroticized foodstuffs—Christopher witnesses an assassination. Impulsively, he throws himself into the action, and becomes the almost-willing victim of a political kidnapping. Will his ex-wife come to his rescue? Will the harshly beautiful Palestinian pediatrician Hawwa Habash soften toward her accidental prisoner? Suffused with culinary delights and political menace, this funny, fast-paced novel uses a fascination with food as a metaphor for an age obsessed with excess and the ultimate rejection of it.

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Telling the story of the first 50 years of New Zealand's National Youth Orchestra, this account covers its successful international tours and performances in cities around New Zealand as well as its 2009 concert season. The first history of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's (NZSO) Youth Orchestra, the chronicle is enlivened by the memories and stories of past members. Including photographs, posters, and programs drawn from the group's archives as well as personal collections, this warm and accessible compilation celebrates the orchestra's unique character.

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New Zealand’s China Experience collects fiction, poetry, personal accounts, historical narrative, anecdotes, transcribed oral narratives, newspaper articles and more, all bearing in one way or another on New Zealand perceptions of China and contacts with China and the Chinese. The book is richly illustrated with photographs, paintings, posters, and cartoons, and includes photographs by Brian Brake, George Silk, and Tom Hutchins, and three works by the contemporary artist Kerry Ann Lee. This unique collection brings together history from an 1823 report pointing to the importance of the Chinese market, to firsthand reports of the bombing of Shanghai from Yunan caves. The book also marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between New Zealand and China in December 1972.

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Providing a vital background to some of the pressing issues in contemporary New Zealand politics, this novel perspective on the distinctive foundations of the country’s welfare state raises issues concerning modern-day concepts of citizenship as this welfare state comes under challenge. Government policy has been linked to this evolving social contract between wage earners and the state; With the contract’s genesis in the migration of wage earners from Britain in the 1840s, New Zealand became an experimental laboratory, first promoting settlement of the land, then safeguarding the economic position of the male breadwinner, and—with the emergence of the welfare state in the early 20th century—protecting the standard of living of families. As it explains the social policies and how they changed over time, this book reveals how honoring this contract was the driving force behind its evolution.

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Providing fresh and unnerving perspectives on life, this collection of seductive and provocative stories explores the games people play and the tales that they tell. These eclectic narratives feature an old lady who dangles desperate messages from her window, the secret to writing a worldwide bestseller, and the wondering if such events as a day at the beach in Paekakariki, Wellington harbor at dusk, or a new pair of shoes from Dunedin can permanently change one's outlook. With quirky humor and extraordinary insights, this compelling collection of tales emphasizes themes of universal human frailty.

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