Blog Archives

Fresh frames, Lawrence Jones

Gorse is Not People: New and Uncollected Stories Janet Frame Penguin, $40.00, ISBN 9780143567707   The title story of this posthumous collection touches a memory almost 30 years old: in 1984 reading An Angel at My Table, the second volume…
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Posted in Autobiography, Literature, Non-fiction, Review, Short stories

Life in the bush, by the bay, Dougal McNeill

Speaking Frankly: The Frank Sargeson Memorial Lectures 2003-2010 Sarah Shieff (ed) Cape Catley, $31.99, ISBN 9781877340277   Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds) Palgrave Macmillan, $162.00, ISBN 9780230277731   It was a…
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Posted in Essays, Lecture, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

Time capsule stories, Julian Novitz

Beyond the Breakwater: Stories 1948-1998 O E Middleton (ed Lawrence Jones)  Otago University Press, $49.95,  ISBN 9781877372568 This large collection of O E Middleton’s short fiction spans 50 years of the author’s career and yet, on the surface, the style…
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Posted in Literature, Review, Short stories

Ironic projections, Lawrence Jones

Small Holes in the Silence: Short Stories Patricia Grace Penguin, $34.99, ISBN 0143020994 Patricia Grace’s new collection, Small Holes in the Silence: Short Stories (her fifth), appeared last year. This was 31 years after Waiariki burst on the scene to…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Short stories

Telling moments, Lawrence Jones

Collected Stories Barbara Anderson Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734980 In the “Author’s Note” prefacing her The Peacocks and Other Stories, Barbara Anderson said that she found “writing short stories requires a completely different technique from writing novels”, and that…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Short stories

Woman alone, Lawrence Jones

The Captive Wife Fiona Kidman Vintage, $27.95, ISBN 1869416864   The title of The Captive Wife and the setting, New Zealand and Australia of the 1930s, lead us to expect a colonial captivity narrative, and it is present in Betty…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Local and special, Stuart Murray

Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945 Lawrence Jones Victoria University Press, $49.94, ISBN 0864734557 Nationalism, and especially cultural nationalism, inhabits a position in contemporary culture that seems peculiarly complex. Easy to identify, yet…
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Posted in History, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

Fingerprints over everything, Lawrence Jones

Red Shoes Elizabeth Smither Godwit, $29.95, ISBN 18569621034 The Sea Between Us Elizabeth Smither Penguin, $27.95, ISBN 0143018590 Reviewing You’re Very Seductive William Carlos Williams 25 years ago, Lauris Edmond complained that in the poems we did not “feel that…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Review

Variations on the familiar, Lawrence Jones

Ellie and the Shadow Man  Maurice Gee Penguin Books, $34.95, ISBN 0141004177 Responses to Maurice Gee’s Ellie and the Shadow Man, his fourteenth adult novel and his twenty-sixth book, will probably vary between the extremes marked by two of my…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Four to tango, Lawrence Jones

Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance Lloyd Jones Penguin Books, $34.95, ISBN 014308183 No reader of Lloyd Jones’s last novel, The Book of Fame, Winner of the Deutz medal in 2001, would have been able…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
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