Books

Howl (an excerpt)

Posted 7:08pm Sunday 13th May 2012 by Staff Reporter

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, Read more...

Bossypants

Posted 12:51am Monday 7th May 2012 by Feby Idrus

Oh, Miss Tina, will you marry me? Who’s this Tina, you ask? That’d be Tina Fey, former Saturday Night Live writer, 30 Rock creator, all-round comedienne and now, thanks to her debut book Bossypants, pants-splittingly funny author. Part sardonic memoir, part behind-the-scenes tour, and part Read more...

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores

Posted 4:56pm Sunday 29th April 2012 by Louise Pearman

Memories of my Melancholy Whores is the story of an unnamed, lonely, 90-year-old man who decides to treat himself to “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” He then finds liberation in his decision not to take the drugged 14-year-old’s virginity, and proceeds to fall in love Read more...

Pets! Dead Or Alive!

Posted 5:04pm Sunday 22nd April 2012 by Bradley Watson

Marina Lewycka’s Various Pets Alive and Dead delves into the development of a slightly dysfunctional family who have taken very different lives after growing up in a left-wing liberal commune. Set in 2008, the novel moves between Doncaster and London, exploring both the present lives of the Read more...

Ignorance

Posted 3:53pm Sunday 15th April 2012 by Josef Alton

Ignorance is not just stupidity. Milan Kundera’s thoughtful examination of repatriation is qualified by his own experience as a Czech émigré living in France. His firsthand experience of what it is like to leave home and start over provides the novel with a problematic yet realistic interpretation Read more...

Franny and Zooey

Posted 7:07pm Sunday 1st April 2012 by Josef Alton

Franny and Zooey is a book about the two youngest siblings of the Glass family. It’s separated into two distinct sections — the first being a short story called Franny, and the second being a novella entitled Zooey. The first part focuses on Franny and her boyfriend Lane when they meet up Read more...

The 10pm Question

Posted 4:26pm Sunday 25th March 2012 by Natasha Loveday

“Frankie liked very much to remember that February the fourteenth had begun badly and shown every sign of becoming a real horror, but – as the benefit of hindsight proved – it marked, ultimately, a turning point in his mood and fortune, because at 8.36 a.m. the new girl boarded Cassino’s East-West Read more...

John Cooper Clarke

Posted 4:27pm Sunday 18th March 2012 by Tash Smillie

In a brilliant coup d’état for Critic’s poetry section, Dunedin has snared itself a poet of international infamy as the headline act of this year’s Fringe Festival. John Cooper Clarke, “punk’s poet laureate” will be bringing his iconic performance poetry to Sammy’s this month. Described as Read more...

The Prince of Soul and the Lighthouse

Posted 6:37pm Sunday 11th March 2012 by Sasha Borissenko

If you are not alarmed by the orange colour of the book-face, perhaps it is the Crouching-Tiger-Hidden-Dragon font that ought to be questioned. Superficiality aside, this fantasy-epic essentially involves the following storyline: Boy pines over exotic girl. Boy sings to girl. Boy has trouble Read more...

Monsieur Pain

Posted 4:53pm Sunday 4th March 2012 by Josef Alton

Paris, 1938: a Peruvian poet named Vallejo is dying of the hiccups in a hospital bed. Monsieur Pain is a mesmerist, a man living on a meager war pension; his lungs were scorched in Verdun. Two Spaniards are following him; General Franco has sacked España; the middle-aged war veteran is in love with Read more...