The Intimacy Bus
By Janet Charman
In The Intimacy Bus, award-winning poet Janet Charman reckons with some of life’s heaviest traffic: bereavement, grief, ageing, loneliness, gender, sexual identity, power and inequality. Along the way, the collection gathers up encounters with friends and strangers, and reflections on matters as various as Korean telenovelas, classic films, personal memories, ‘modern life’, real estate, ‘sex treats’, companion animals, a favourite hairdresser, finding joy, a grandmother’s politics and the rapper Psy.
Books of Mana
180 Māori-Authored Books of Significance
Edited by Jacinta Ruru, Angela Wanhalla and Jeanette Wikaira
Books of Mana celebrates the rich tradition of Māori authorship in Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the central place of over 200 years of print literacy within te ao Māori and vividly conveys how books are understood as taonga tuku iho – treasured items handed down through generations. In this beautifully illustrated collection of essays, some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most renowned Māori thinkers join the editors in a wide-ranging kōrero about the influence and empowerment of Māori writing.
Landfall 248: Spring 2024
Spring 2024
Edited by Lynley Edmeades
Landfall is Aotearoa’s longest-running arts and literary journal. Each volume brims with vital new fiction, art, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. Landfall 248: Spring 2024 announces the winner of the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition and the winners of the 2024 Caselberg International Poetry Prize. Landfall 248 also includes essays from Landfall’s 2024 collaborative series with RMIT University’s nonfiction/Lab on the theme of ‘making space’.
Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit
By Emma Neale
Fibs, porkies, little white lies, absolute whoppers and criminal evasions: the ways we can deceive each other are legion. Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, the new collection by Ōtepoti poet and writer Emma Neale, is fascinated by our doubleness. Prompted by the rich implications in a line from Joseph Brodsky — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’ — it combines a personal memoir of lies with an exploration of wider social deceptions.
Blue Hour
by Jo McNeice
Set in the green spaces and urban grit of contemporary Te Whanganui-a-Tara, this award-winning debut collection from poet Jo McNeice unfolds like a Gothic fairytale. Darkness and light ripple through these haunting, intimate poems, which draw on themes of love, madness, betrayal, desire and recovery to tell the story of a woman searching among the images and events of her life for answers – sometimes finding them, sometimes not.
Remembering and Becoming
Oral History in Aotearoa New Zealand
Edited by Anna Green and Megan Hutching
Remembering and Becoming: Oral history in Aotearoa New Zealand investigates how oral history enriches our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand’s past. The book provides clear explanations of oral history methodologies and insightful analyses of personal narratives while exploring themes such as race, culture, class, religion, gender, place, sexuality, and age. Drawing from diverse backgrounds and extensive experience, the contributing authors challenge conventional historical assumptions and highlight the unique insights oral histories provide.
Pretty Ugly
Kirsty Gunn
Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn is the inaugural title in a new series of short story collections from Landfall Tauraka and Otago University Press, celebrating the art of short fiction in Aotearoa New Zealand. These 13 stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are a testament to Gunn’s unrivalled ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. Gunn’s is a steady, unflinching gaze. Each story is an exquisite, thorn-sharp bouquet.
The Twisted Chain
By Jason Gurney
The Twisted Chain combines a personal story about the impacts of rheumatic fever in Jason Gurney’s family with an exploration of the multi-factorial causes of rheumatic fever, investigating the reasons for the shockingly high rates of rheumatic fever in New Zealand’s Māori and Pasifika communities.
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology
Edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan
With more than 100 poems of celebration, elegy, fear, hope and activism, Koe An Aotearoa Ecopoetry Anthology provides a comprehensive overview of the traditions, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon, challenging traditional Eurocentric perspectives and wrestling with the impacts of European colonisation.
Forms of Freedom
Marxist Essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature
By Dougal McNeill
In Forms of Freedom Dougal McNeill explores how the creative literary imagination can influence progressive social change in the real world. In engaging prose and with impressive intellectual range, McNeill applies insights from Marxist critical theory to the works of selected Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian writers and reveals literature’s capacity to find potent forms with which to articulate concepts of, and beliefs about, freedom.
Power to Win
The Living Wage Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand
by Lyndy McIntyre
Power to Win tells the story of the living wage movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Here, Lyndy McIntyre documents the movement’s efforts to lift the wages of the most disadvantaged people in our workforce – women, Māori, Pacifica, migrants and refugees, and young workers. McIntyre provides a window into the lives of these workers and those committed to ending in-work poverty: the activists, faith groups, unions and community organisations who come together to tilt the axis of power from employers to low-wage workers.