Blog Archives

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Amy Brown

Winter Of Fire (25th Anniversary Edition) Sherryl Jordan Scholastic, $19.00, ISBN 9781775435983 I was ten when Winter Of Fire was first released, three years after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It was a little later that I read Sherryl Jordan’s…
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Posted in Imprints, Review

Timeless and timely, Hannah Marshall

Winter Of Fire (25th Anniversary Edition) Sherryl Jordan Scholastic, $19.00, ISBN 9781775435983 A dismal world where the sun has disappeared is the backdrop for Sherryl Jordan’s hard-hitting and powerful novel Winter Of Fire. Back in print 25 years after its…
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Posted in Imprints, Review, Young adults

Making Art in words and paint

Grahame Sydney, artist, recalls a significant book. It lay beside my bed through most of my teenaged years, one of two constant companions of my privately turbulent adolescence. The other was Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, and both paperbacks grew…
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Beginning with myths

The novelist Hamish Clayton rereads Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame I first read Lloyd Jones’s The Book of Fame soon after it had won the Deutz Medal for fiction, at the then-Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. It…
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Posted in Imprints

The longings of the placid, Mary McCallum

Mary McCallum recalls the pleasures of The Wind in the Willows and traces its influence on her first children’s book The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters;…
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Posted in Imprints

Fireflies in the twilight, Gregory O’Brien

Painter and poet Gregory O’Brien reflects on Jean Arp’s Collected French Writings. i was born in nature … i have four natures. i have two things. i have five senses. sense and non-sense. nature is senseless. make way for nature.…
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Slow, sure meaning, Hamish Clayton

Hamish Clayton reflects on The English Patient. “The first time she dreamed of him she woke up beside her husband screaming.” When I was 21, I wrote that line out dozens of times, by hand, into a battered school exercise…
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Posted in Imprints

Bookshelf

  Non-fiction Diplomatic Ladies: New Zealand’s Unsung Envoys, Joanna Woods, Otago University Press, $50.00, ISBN 9781877578304 Using private letters and interviews, the author of Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001) writes about the wives and daughters who have…
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Hums, James Brown

James Brown looks back at A A Milne’s classic books for children. The World of Pooh is my all-time favourite formative book. This is a collection containing A A Milne’s two Pooh books – Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh…
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Posted in Children, Imprints, Literature

Not on the Cromwell Road, Margot Schwass

Margot Schwass travels A Long Way from Verona with Jane Gardam. It was the school holidays; I was 12 or so, much given to moping about and staring fruitlessly out of windows when I had nothing to read. This of…
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Posted in Imprints, Literature, Young adults
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