The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest: Travel Tales of the South Pacific Graeme Lay Awa Press, $29.95, ISBN 0958250901 Liars and Lovers: A Travel Memoir Diane Brown Vintage, $26.95, ISBN 1869416147 As a child, I used to read adventure stories featuring…
Book Book Fiona Farrell Vintage, $26.95, ISBN 1869416198 I associate being in Christchurch with knowing Fiona Farrell. Both of us came down from provincial North Island cities, Hamilton and Palmerston North, in the early 1990s. I came to teach in…
The Life and the Dark Richard Reeve Auckland University Press, $21.99, ISBN 1869403126 Wild Dogs Under My Skirt Tusiata Avia Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864734743 Richard Reeve fits the definition: he is a man possessed of more than usual…
Black and White John Tamihere (with Helen Bain) Reed, $29.95, ISBN 0790009641 Few politicians these days have lives interesting enough to write about, let alone turn into saleable books. No one is going to queue up at Whitcoulls for Steve…
The House: New Zealand’s House of Representatives 1854-2004 John E Martin Dunmore Press, $59.95, ISBN 0864694636 Parliament is a brutal place. Only the idealistic, the ideological, the hard-nosed and the ruthless gather there. No person is inviolate, no secret safe,…
The Drover’s Road Collection: Adventures in New Zealand Joyce West Bethlehem Books & Ignatius Press, $35.95 [approx], ISBN 1883937698 Joyce West published Drover’s Road with Dent in London in 1953. Two further volumes about Gay Allan and the other Drover’s…
An Asian at my Table Raybon Kan Penguin, $29.95, ISBN 0143019104 I first encountered Raybon Kan across a crowded news room at The Dominion when I was just starting out as tv critic back in the early 1990s. Raybon had…
Ready to Fly: The Story of New Zealand Rock Music David Eggleton Craig Potton Publishing, $49.95, ISBN 1877333069 I have a confession to make. I’m not much of a reader – at least not in the always-head-in-a-novel kind of a…
Art and craft – the story so far, Megan Clayton
Ask someone with a literature PhD why they did it and you’ll get a grab-bag of answers, from feeling the devil’s shoulder-tap of academic ambition to it seeming like a good idea at the time. I did mine for both…
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