Janet M. Wilson The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 3: The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Angela Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 754 pp., £175; Volume 4, The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield: Including miscellaneous works, edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (Edinburgh […]
Edge-of-the-Ledge Reading
Shaun Barnett To the Mountains: A collection of New Zealand alpine writing selected by Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey (Otago University Press, 2018), 372 pp., $45 New Zealand is a mountainous land, so it’s hardly surprising that landscape often shapes our literature. Think of Mulgan’s protagonist Johnson, a fugitive traipsing through the Kaimanawa Ranges in […]
Mobile Weather
Helen Watson White A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903 by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2017), 271 pp., $39.95 In his prologue to A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington 1888–1903, Redmer Yska recalls Graham Greene’s idea that childhood is ‘the fiction writer’s credit balance’. In this regard, he says, Mansfield as daughter […]
A Language of Subterfuge
Nicholas Reid Hard Frost: Structures of feeling in New Zealand literature, 1908–1945 by John Newton (Victoria University Press, 2017), 368 pp., $40 After Stuart Murray’s Never a Soul at Home (VUP 1998), Lawrence Jones’ Picking Up the Traces (VUP 2003) and numerous other texts of literary revisionism, it is hard to imagine that anything new […]
Private Admissions Between Friends
David Herkt Jay To Bee: Janet Frame’s letters to William Theophilus Brown, edited by Denis Harold (Counterpoint, Berkley, California, 2016), 464 pp., $45.20 All letters are performances. There is a writer and there is an audience. The relationship between the two is never static, but it turns in line with time and circumstance. Jay to […]
Mapping and Remapping a Literary Nation
Lawrence Jones A History of New Zealand Literature, edited by Mark Williams (Cambridge UP 2016), 417 pp., $225.95 Until the publication of this book in April 2016 there had been only one multi-author history of New Zealand literature – The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (1991, second edn. 1998), although there had […]
The Steadland Protagonist
Andrew Paul Wood The Name on the Door is not Mine: Stories new and selected by C.K. Stead (Allen & Unwin, 2016), 304 pp., $39.99 New Zealand’s doyen of literary criticism, senior poet and writer of fiction, C.K. Stead, now in his eighth decade, needs very little introduction, though reviewing his books is not without […]
Bringing Katherine Mansfield to Life
Claire Mabey Mansfield & Me: A graphic memoir by Sarah Laing (Victoria University Press, 2016), 336pp, $35 There is something to be said for judging a book by its cover. Particularly a book within which the images are as important, as lively and revealing, as the text. The cover of Sarah Laing’s graphic memoir Mansfield […]
Engineers of a New Order
Grace Millar Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984–2008: Market fictions by Jennifer Lawn (Lexington Books, 2016), 251 pp., $96 In 2014 I tutored a first-year history paper about World War I. During a discussion about war and universities a student asked: ‘Did students pay fees in those days?’ She was born in […]
Big Barmy Conspiracy Caper
Emily Brookes Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, 2016), 376 pp., $30 A few months ago, after nearly a decade overseas, my husband and I began preparing to bring our young family back to Wellington. But where in Wellington? You have Mt Victoria, with its Art Nouveau architecture and well-heeled […]
Exploring Layers of Truth
Nicholas Reid Strait Men and other tales by Murray Edmond (Steele Roberts, 2015), 184 pp., $29.99 Somebody is talking about somebody else. Somebody is investigating somebody else’s life or deconstructing what somebody has written or claimed about himself. Somebody is being questioned about the accuracy of what he is saying. Somebody enters into dialogue with either […]
Blood and Guts in Wartime
David Eggleton The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing, edited by Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (Penguin Random House, 2015), 602 pp., $65; Calls to Arms: New Zealand society and commitment to the Great War by Steven Loveridge (Victoria University Press, 2014), 336 pp., $40; How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World […]