Season of Discontent: By-elections and the Bolger Government Raymond Miller and Helena Catt, Dunmore Publishing, 1993, $29.95 The “season of discontent” to which this book refers began within weeks of National’s victory in October 1990. When the Bolger Government found…
The Inward Sun: Celebrating the Life and Work of Janet Frame Elizabeth Alley (ed), Daphne Brasell Associates Press, $34.95 Perhaps the worst fate a writer can suffer is to have their life talked about while their work is ignored. If…
Scenes from a Small City Lauris Edmond, Daphne Brassell Associates, $24.95 Lauris Edmond’s poems have always conveyed a strong sense of time and place, so it is no surprise that in a volume based around life in Wellington the…
Baker’s Dozen Tom Bradley, HarperCollins, $12.95 Saved by Ryan Kane Pauline Cartwright, Ashton Scholastic, $7.95 The Secret of Boomer Lake Ken Catran, HarperCollins, $10.95 The Breakdown Day Dorothy Butler, Ashton Scholastic, $12.95 Tom Bradley’s Baker’s Dozen is a collection of…
The Miserables Damien Wilkins, Victoria University Press, 1993, $24.95 This, Damien Wilkins’s first novel, seems a natural extension of his earlier stories and poems. It is a bildungsroman of a very modernistic sort, tightly written, concise in scope but large…
Like You, Really Kate Flannery, Penguin Books, $24.95 The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep Vivienne Plumb, Otago University Press, $24.95 Best Friends Elspeth Sandys, David Ling, $19.95 All the Tenderness Left in the World Stephanie Johnson, Otago University…
Part of the democratic pantomime: An edited transcript of the 1993 Shelley Lecture, Margaret Mahy
Some years ago I wrote a children’s story called A Work of Art in which a woman made a particularly beautiful cake. Two gentlemen, proprietors of an inner-city art gallery, see it through the window, and ask if they may…
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