Blog Archives

Imagined pasts, alternative futures, Craig Cliff

The Necessary Angel C K Stead Allen and Unwin, $37.00, ISBN 9781760631529 Salt Picnic Patrick Evans Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 9781776561698 Our Future is in the Air Tim Corballis Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 9781776561179 When a white male…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Fiction’s odd couple, Mark Williams

Gifted  Patrick Evans Victoria University Press, $30.00, ISBN 9780864736376   A curious rumour about this new novel by Patrick Evans preceded its publication. The rumour was that Evans had done something exceptionally good and it came from people one didn’t…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Cooked up, Stuart Murray

The Long Forgetting: Post-colonial Literary Culture in New Zealand Patrick Evans Canterbury University Press, $34.50,  ISBN 9781877257698 Approximately halfway through Patrick Evans’ study comes a paragraph that, upon reflection, more or less sums up the way the book works. The…
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Posted in History, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

The Jones effect, Patrick Evans

Mister Pip Lloyd Jones Penguin, $35.00, ISBN 9780143020899 Lloyd Jones is the man who wrote a book about a child molester, and no one noticed – what better proof do we need that journalists don’t really read fiction? And yet…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

The “Frame effect”, Patrick Evans

The most famous of Janet Frame’s poems is probably the one about the little boy dying of leukaemia, “Yet Another Poem About a Dying Child”, which ends with the appearance of Death as a giant spider which gobbles the child…
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Posted in Comment

A long look back, Patrick Evans

Seven New Zealand Novellas ed Peter Simpson Reed, $34.95, ISBN 0790008963 “New Zealand literature” as it is currently presented and studied at the University of Canterbury was established in the decade from 1977 by Peter Simpson, who doggedly developed the…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Short stories

Falling on his feet, Patrick Evans

Backwards to Forwards: A Memoir Kevin Ireland Vintage, $29.95, ISBN 1869414993 Some time in 1986 (I think it was), Kevin Ireland turned up at the University of Canterbury English Department as writer-in-residence. What returns to the memory is a series…
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Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

Clinging to the wreckage, Patrick Evans

Harlequin Rex Owen Marshall Random House/Vintage, $24.95, ISBN 1 86941 395 4 Y2K is past, the computer and the fridge are still working, but in Owen Marshall’s new novel Harlequin Rex the millennium has unexpectedly tossed up another problem, an…
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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

When the conversation lollies run out, Patrick Evans

The Dictionary of New Zealand English: New Zealand words and their origins ed H W Orsman Oxford University Press, $150.00, ISBN 0 19 558347 7 It is nearly 20 years since I and a number of fellow conference-goers spent an…
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Posted in Language, Non-fiction, Review
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