Blog Archives
The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction Doreen D’Cruz and John C Ross Rodopi, €85.00, ISBN 9789042034747 Loneliness holds a special place in New Zealand literature. If there is a single image that casts…
Director of The Holloway Press Peter Simpson celebrates the joy of letterpress. The Holloway Press is dedicated to letterpress printing, a technology rendered largely obsolete by the dawn of the digital age. Letterpress printing – that is, the direct impression…
Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror Nicky Hager Craig Potton Publishing, $45.00, ISBN 9781877517693 About a year ago, shortly after this book was published, I heard Nicky Hager in an interview deploring the…
New Zealand Listener books and culture editor Guy Somerset tries to be brave about e-books. It’s the bookmarks I’ll miss most. At least that’s what I used to think when I was a fervent advocate of the demise of the…
The Good Doctor: What Patients Want Ron Paterson Auckland University Press, $40.00, ISBN 9781869405922 Neither title nor subtitle accurately reflects the thrust of this book. It is less about how we might distinguish the good doctor (and define what we…
It’s a polemic Your reviewer Louise O’Brien (NZB, Spring 2012) criticises me for not offering solutions “to the many problems which [The Passionless People Revisited] lays out so emphatically”. Oh dear. It is a polemic, a legitimate form of disputation…
Sonnet Fuck your simile. Fuck your elegy for. Fuck your homily, your extended metaphor. Fuck your metonymy. Fuck your exquisite language economy. Fuck your metre, your keeping time. Fuck your vers libre. Fuck your rhyme. Fuck your Elizabethan men…
Kathryn Walls identifies the realism beneath Mahy’s magic. Margaret Mahy has been repeatedly described as “magical” or “marvellous”, her fiction as “fantastic.” These conveniently alliterating adjectives seem apt partly because so much of Mahy’s work is classifiable as fantasy, and…
Whithering or withering? Back in the day, literary couple Iris Murdoch and John Bayley used to speak of “whithering”. They were referring to international festivals at which they were asked to address the question “whither the novel?” At the dawn…
Novelist and poet Fiona Kidman recalls her first published book. When first asked to contribute this essay, my response was to beg another later book. My first novel, perhaps? On reflection, I saw this for the cowardice it was. The…
Obsolescence is just the beginning, Peter Simpson
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