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Language and Literature
By BK Drinkwater | September 29, 2008
Anonymous, Consultation Document for a Revised Structure of
VUWSA Business
(Wellington, VUWSA, 2008)
At the start of September, VUWSA-watchers were abuzz with the news that Anonymous—the loose collective of illiterate bards whose work was amalgamated and attributed to Homer as The Iliad and The Odyssey, who later composed Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and who more lately gained fame for persecuting Scientologists More
By Kerry Tankard | September 15, 2008
By Jill Trevelyan
Published by Te Papa Press, 2008
This is my second visually lush review book in the past short while, and is written by the co-curator of the Rita Angus retrospective now exhibiting at Te Papa, so is necessarily a companion volume for those who are really keen on this painter, one of Aotearoa’s most iconic, most independent, feminist and pacifist artists. More
By Cara Pollock | September 8, 2008
Catherynne M Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden (Bantam Spectra, 2006) and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Bantam Spectra, 2007)
Confronted with a fantasy novel published in two volumes, and split into several ‘books’, it would not be unreasonable to assume that it told of some epic adventure, with a hero out to save the world. There’s no world-saving in Catherynne M Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales, no sole hero. More
By Tristan Egarr | September 1, 2008
Commonly referred to as “the Citizen Kane of comics”, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen takes the standard gangof- superheroes comic formula and subverts it by demonstrating the fascistic, apocalyptic consequences that vigilanteworship can have. While I don’t regard The Watchmen as the greatest comic ever – it doesn’t have the depth of imagination or pathos of Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman series – it is brilliant, and forever changed the face of graphic writing. More
By Tristan Egarr | September 1, 2008
I was a latecomer to comic books: they’re supposed to be an adolescent thing, but it wasn’t until Joss Whedon began writing Buffy Season Eight as a comic book series last year that I got into this art form. Fortunately, the folks at Graphix on Cuba Mall (next to Matterhorn) make it easy to get into comics. More
By Sebastian | August 4, 2008
Chris Brickell, Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand
(Godwit, 2008)
When does a homosocial relationship – ie a close relationship between two members of the same sex – become homosexual? This depends upon the definition of ‘sex’, and has far-reaching consequences for how we look at mateship in New Zealand’s history. More
By Kerry Tankard and Grant Buist | July 14, 2008
Graphic Novel
Greg Broadmore, Dr Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory
(Wellington, Weta Publishing & Dark Horse Comics &
HarperCollins, 2008)
This is Greg Broadmore’s first foray into graphic novels, and Weta Workshop’s first piece of wholly owned product; in the past, product has been released through New Line production house, with Weta only receiving a proportion of the royalties. More
By BK Drinkwater | July 14, 2008
Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff
(Random House, 2008)
Snuff, the latest novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke), features 600 men, one day of filming, and a woman’s quest for redemption in vaginal embolism. More
By BK Drinkwater | July 14, 2008
226–256 Lambton Quay
Borders is Wellington’s biggest bookshop, and one of the newest. Prior to its opening there was apprehension that the 800-pound gorilla of chain bookstores would gobble up all the competition in town and replace it with 52-week Dan Brown festivals and sundry other tributes to the mediocre and blandly commercial. More
By Monique Armishaw | July 7, 2008
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone (Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2006).
Hypothetical:
You are restructuring a country in economic peril. Part of the restructuring requires a new stock exchange. You need to find someone to be in charge of this. Would you pick a 24-year-old man, with no experience in finance? More
By Nicholas O'Kane | July 7, 2008
Thomas E Ricks, Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in
Iraq (Penguin, London, 2006).
One of the most significant and controversial wars of our time is the Iraq war. The war is notable for the failure of the US military to install a Western-style democracy in Iraq instead finding itself faced with a in a quagmire similar to the one it had left in Vietnam thirty years previously. real question is: why? More
By Tania Sawicki Mead | July 7, 2008
Riverbend, Baghdad Burning (riverbendblog.blogspot.com)
As a 17 year old wannabe dissident, I derived large amounts of pleasure from churning out mediocre pieces of writing on topical issues, my favourite at the time being the military fiasco otherwise known as Iraq. More
By Matthew Proctor | July 7, 2008
Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Berkeley Caliber, New York, 2006), p 368.
My War: Killing Time in Iraq is a light-hearted and fascinating book. The first of the ‘war-bloggers’ to enter print, Buzzell describes his experiences on the ground in Operation Iraqi Freedom, from his post in Mosul, Iraq. More
By Tristan Egarr | July 7, 2008
Evan Wright, Generation Kill (Transworld Publishers, London, 2004), p446.
Embedded reporters, who accompany armies into battle wearing their uniform, have got a bad rap. Robert Fisk regularly accuses them of being gung-ho propaganda parasites, which they often are. More
By BK Drinkwater | May 26, 2008
New Fiction
Mo Zhi Hong, The Year of the Shanghai Shark (Auckland, Penguin, 2008)
Hai Long is an orphaned pickpocket, living with his uncle on the money provided by rich foreigners’ wallets in the North-Eastern Chinese city of Dalian during 2003 – the year of SARS and the invasion of Iraq. More
By BK Drinkwater | May 19, 2008
The Third Policeman
Flann O’Brien
Brian O’Nolan’s job prevented him from writing under his own name, so over the course of hundreds of newspaper columns and God only knows how many letters to the editor of The Irish Times, he wrote under noms de plume. In fact, he wrote under so many different names that there’s probably a rather tedious thesis in trying to pin them all down. More
By Anna Gorham | May 19, 2008
Amy Brown, The Propaganda Poster
Girl, (VUP, Wellington, 2008).
Amy Brown’s first collection of poetry, The Propaganda Poster Girl, is a clearly written rest stop for a weary student, and, as imagined in the poem ‘Brain’, a petrol station for the brain. A creative writing MA graduate, the Biggs Prize-winning poet deals with family, travel, love and most importantly the art and act of writing. More
By BK Drinkwater | May 19, 2008
I know of plenty of book-lovers in this town who’d never heard of Quilters until I pointed out its existence, and of at least two who struggled to find it after that. This is odd because Lambton Quay isn’t exactly a super-subtle hiding place. More
By Kerry Tankard | May 5, 2008
Redefining Our Relationships;
Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships,
Defiant Times Press, Oakland, CA, 2002.
Beginning with a quote from Emma Goldman, “The most vital right is the right to love and be loved,” Wendy discusses a bunch of thorny concepts beloved of those who practice polyamory – relationships based around the conscious involvement of more than two intimate sexual partners. More
By Kerry Tankard | April 28, 2008
Peter Wells’ latest novel, Lucky Bastard, covers a seldom-discussed period of the Second World War: the War in the Pacific, and the investigation of Japanese war crimes by British, Australian, and Kiwi officers. More
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