Blog Archives
The Occupiers: New Zealand Veterans Remember Post-war Japan Alison Parr Penguin Books, $45.00, ISBN 9780143567240 In Love and War: Kiwi Soldiers’ Romantic Encounters in Wartime Italy Susan Jacobs Penguin Books, $40.00, ISBN 9780143567554 I detoured into these two books while…
Jane Westaway sells a book and wonders how. Eleven years ago I published a novel. Last Wednesday I received my latest royalty statement. Somewhere out there, I understand, are authors who, along with their statements, get cheques that go some…
We call it winter We call it winter, this Northland chill with its one-bar heater, its woollen cap, its hint of frost on the roof. But you have to laugh when you think of Eskimos crowding round a whale-oil…
At the Frankfurt Book Fair: a triolet We do our best to do our stuff, our quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle. A Lion in the Meadow meets Alan Duff: We do our best to do our stuff. The things…
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…
Cashing up, Jane Westaway
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