Dark Night: Walking with McCahon Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $37.99, ISBN 9781869404833 A meander through Sydney in the possible footsteps of artist Colin McCahon, who once spent 28 amnesiac hours lost in the unfamiliar city, seems a flimsy…
Report on Experience: John Mulgan Peter Whiteford (ed) Victoria University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780864736192 In Keats’s last letter, sent from Rome to his friend Charles Brown in England three months before he died, he writes of his “habitual feeling of…
Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon Gordon Brown Auckland University Press, $79.99, ISBN 9781869404529 As I began to read the 16 essays, plus introduction, that make up Gordon Brown’s Towards a Promised Land, I…
Chance is a Fine Thing Philip Temple Vintage, $36.99, ISBN 9781869419851 In his preface to Chance is a Fine Thing, Philip Temple – writer, mountaineer, campaigner, explorer and historian – essays a distinction between memoir and autobiography. The latter, he…
Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $34.99, ISBN 9781869404475 Anna Kavan’s New Zealand: A Pacific Interlude in a Turbulent Life Jennifer Sturm (ed) Vintage, $36.99, ISBN 9781869791339 Passageways: The Story of a…
Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany Brian Turner Godwit, $44.99, ISBN 9781869621421 Near the beginning of the seventh of the 34 essays in this book, the 16-year-old Brian Turner, full of teenage angst and contemplating suicide, is sitting…
Waimarino County and Other Excursions Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $35.00, ISBN 9781869403911 Phone Home Berlin – Collected Non-fiction Nigel Cox Victoria University Press, $35.00, ISBN 9780864735676 The revival of the essay in book form continues compensating, to our…