This review was first published in the print edition of Landfall 243

Charlotte Grimshaw

Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand’s best writers, ed. Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, 2021), 560pp, $40

One day recently, when we were in the middle of a discussion about the current pandemic, perhaps the Delta surge we’d just overcome in Auckland or the projected peak of the Omicron wave, my mother’s expression turned glazed and distant and she began to describe another pandemic in another time: the polio outbreak in her childhood that closed the schools, setting her and her sisters and friends free to roam and run wild for a whole summer. And it was, she said, now she remembered it, an exceptionally long, hot summer like the drought in Auckland in 2020 and 2021, when the parks turned brown, the streams dried up, the skies every day were cloudless blue, and for her, back then, there was nothing to be done but swim and bike for miles and dream your way through another day, a gang of kids liberated from the world of school and clocks and teachers and parents, just for a time. The adults must have been fearful (infantile paralysis, the horrifying threat of the ‘iron lung’: what could be more terrifying for a parent?) but she remembered it as dreamy, idyllic, timeless, mercifully free from the tyranny of phones and computers and Zoom. No Google school, no remote learning; you could read a book under a tree, and other than that, some lessons might arrive in the mail every now and then. [Read more…]

Kerry Lane

The Pink Jumpsuit: Short fictions, tall truths by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021), 134pp, $35 

The Pink Jumpsuit is the latest book by Emma Neale, one of the best-known writers working in Aotearoa today. Neale’s previous work includes six novels and six collections of poetry, and too many awards and honours to list here. Her flash and short fiction has also been widely published and acclaimed, but this is the first time these small pieces—short fictions and tall truths, as the subtitle describes them—have been gathered into a collection.  [Read more…]