Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories

Hilma Wolitzer     Recommended by Julia    

The uncannily relevant, deliciously clear-eyed collected stories of critically acclaimed, award-winning ‘American literary treasure’ (Boston Globe), ripe for rediscovery, with a foreword by Elizabeth Strout.

Another day! And then another and another and another. It seemed as if it would all go on forever in that exquisitely boring and beautiful way. But of course it wouldn’t; everyone knows that.

In this collection, Hilma Wolitzer invites us inside the private world of domestic bliss, seen mostly through the lens of Paulie and Howard’s gloriously ordinary marriage.

From hasty weddings to meddlesome neighbours, ex-wives who just won’t leave, to sleepless nights spent worrying about unanswered chainmail, Wolitzer captures the tensions, contradictions and unexpected detours of daily life with wit, candour and an acutely observant eye.

Including stories first published in magazines in the 1960s and 1970s alongside new writing from Wolitzer, now in her nineties Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket reintroduces a beloved writer to be embraced by a new generation of readers.

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich     Recommended by    

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman’s relentless errors. The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading ‘with murderous attention,’ must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

Ai Weiwei     Recommended by    

In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei  one of the world’s most famous artists and activists – tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation’s most celebrated poet.

Hailed as the most important artist working today by the Financial Times and as an eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom by the New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years while illuminating his artistic process.

Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei’s father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as Little Siberia, where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labour cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candour and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist  and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.

Ai Weiwei’s sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father, whose own creativity was stifled.

At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.

Afterlives

Abdulrazak Gurnah     Recommended by    

BY THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2021
LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2021

‘Riveting and heartbreaking … A compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure’ Maaza Mengiste, Guardian

‘One of the world’s most prominent postcolonial writers – He has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals’ Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee

While he was still a little boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the German colonial troops. After years away, fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away.

Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not stolen for the war, but sold into it; he has grown up at the right hand of an officer whose protection has marked him life. With nothing but the clothes on his back, he seeks only work and security and the love of the beautiful Afiya.

As fate knots these young people together, as they live and work and fall in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent lengthens and darkens, ready to snatch them up and carry them away…

The Every

Dave Eggers     Recommended by    

The electrifying follow-up to Dave Eggers’ New York Times Bestseller The Circle

When the world’s largest search engine/social media company merges with the planet’s dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous-and, oddly enough, most beloved-monopoly ever known – The Every.

Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind- to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company’s weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company – and the human animal.

Annie Leibovitz: Wonderland

Annie Leibovitz     Recommended by    

“[A] gorgeous anthology of fashion images … Leibovitz is nothing less than America’s greatest living photographic portraitist … she has changed fashion photography forever.”  – Anna Wintour

Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz’s surprising account of her encounters with fashion over five decades

‘Looking back at my work, I see that fashion has always been there,’ Annie Leibovitz observes in the preface to Wonderland. ‘Fashion plays a part in the scheme of everything, but photography always comes first for me. The photograph is the most important part. And photography is so big that it can encompass journalism, portraiture, reportage, family photographs, fashion … My work for Vogue fueled the fire for a kind of photography that I might not otherwise have explored.’

Includes 350 extraordinary images (many of them previously unpublished) featuring a wide and diverse range of subjects: Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams, Pina Bausch, RuPaul, Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga, Matthew Barney, Kate Moss, Natalia Vodianova, Rihanna, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy Pelosi. With a foreword by Anna Wintour.

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Love Stories

Trent Dalton     Recommended by    

Trent Dalton, Australia’s best-loved writer, goes out into the world and asks a simple, direct question: ‘Can you please tell me a love story?’

A blind man yearns to see the face of his wife of thirty years. A divorced mother has a secret love affair with a priest. A geologist discovers a three-minute video recorded by his wife before she died. A tree lopper’s heart falls in a forest. A working mum contemplates taking photographs of her late husband down from her fridge. A girl writes a last letter to the man she loves most, then sets it on fire. A palliative care nurse helps a dying woman converse with the angel at the end of her bed. A renowned 100-year-old scientist ponders the one great earthly puzzle he was never able to solve: ‘What is love?’

Endless stories. Human stories. Love stories.

Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, Trent Dalton, bestselling author and one of Australia’s finest journalists, spent two months in 2021 speaking to people from all walks of life, asking them one simple and direct question: ‘Can you please tell me a love story?’ The result is an immensely warm, poignant, funny and moving book about love in all its guises, including observations, reflections and stories of people falling into love, falling out of love, and never letting go of the loved ones in their hearts. A heartfelt, deep, wise and tingly tribute to the greatest thing we will never understand and the only thing we will ever really need: love.

The Story of Work

Jan Lucassen     Recommended by    

The first truly global history of work, an upbeat assessment from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the present day We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity’s busy labor throughout the ages.

Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. He examines how labor is split between men, women, and children; the watershed moment of the invention of money; the collective action of workers; and at the impact of migration, slavery, and the idea of leisure. From peasant farmers in the first agrarian societies to the precarious existence of today’s gig workers, this surprising account of both cooperation and subordination at work throws essential light on the opportunities we face today.

How Decent Folks Behave

Maxine Beneba Clarke     Recommended by    

‘One of the most compelling voices in Australian poetry this decade’ – Overland

We are all just one small disaster away from sinking, and sometimes you only realise when you’re gasping for air.

On a daylight street in Minneapolis Minnesota, a Black man is asphyxiated – by callous knee of an officer, by cruel might of state, and under crushing weight of colony. In Melbourne the body of another woman has been found – this time, after catching a late tram home. The Atlantic has run out of the English alphabet, when christening hurricanes this season. The earth is on fire – from the redwoods of California, to Australia’s east coast. The sea draws back, and tsunamis lash out in Samoa and Sumatra. Water rises in Sulawesi and Nagasaki. Bloated cod are surfacing, all along the Murray Darling. The virus arrives, and the virus thrives. Authorities seal the public housing towers up, and truck in one cop to every five residents. Notre Dame is ablaze – the cathedral spire blackened, and teetering. Out in Biloela, the deportation vans have arrived. Every Friday, in cities all across the world, children are walking out of school. The wolves are circling. The wolves are circling.

These poems speak of the world that is, and sing for a world that may one day be.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a widely published Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. Maxine’s short fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in numerous publications. Her critically acclaimed short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the ABIA for Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2015 and the 2015 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Matt Richell Award for New Writing at the 2015 ABIAs and the 2015 Stella Prize. She was also named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists for 2015.

POW!

Mo Yan     Recommended by    

In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, a benign old monk listens to a prospective novice’s tale of depravity, violence and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama — in which nearly everyone dies — unfurls.

But in this tale of sharp hatchets, bad water and a rusty WWII mortar, we can’t help but laugh. Reminiscent of the novels of dark masters of European absurdism like Günter Grass, Witold Gombrowicz or Jakov Lind, Mo Yan’s POW! is a comic masterpiece.

In this bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside, the author treats us to a cornucopia of cooked animal flesh — ostrich, camel, donkey, dog as well as the more common varieties. As his dual narratives merge and feather into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, Mo Yan probes the character and lifestyle of modern China. Displaying his many talents, as fabulist, storyteller, scatologist, master of allusion and cliché and more, POW! carries the reader along quickly, hungrily and giddily, up until its surprising dénouement.

Mo Yan has been called one of the great novelists of modern Chinese literature and the New York Times Book Review has hailed his work as harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny. He writes big, sometimes mystifying, sometimes infuriating, but always entertaining novels — and POW! is no exception.

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