Bøger udgivet af Victoria University Press

I think it's fair to say I was rewarded, praised, applauded, more than most fathers.Peter Collie is adrift in the wake of his wife's death. His attempts to understand the turn his life has taken lead him back to the past, to dismaying events on an Amsterdam houseboat in the seventies, returning to New Zealand and meeting Moira, an amateur painter who carried secrets of her own, and to a trip to Europe years later with his family. An unexpected revelation forces Peter to navigate anew his roles as a husband, father and son.Set in Wellington after the fall of the Twin Towers, and traversing London, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, The New Ships is a mesmerising book of blood-ties that stretch across borders. A novel of acute moral choices, it is a rich and compelling meditation on what it means to act, or to fail to act.

Effortlessly blending dark humor with unnerving situations, this collection of stories addresses a variety of entertaining scenarios with warmth and subtlety. From a story about a little girl out of her depth in a friendship with an adult neighbor to an armed intruder thwarted by a bee and from a tale about a woman determined to believe in her brother's goodness under the shadow of accusation to a story about a Christmas dinner guest who will eat only peas, these works describe surreal, sometimes menacing situations that are equally original and funny.

In these 14 magnificent new stories from a New Zealand master, Vincent O'Sullivan exhibits a shrewd understanding that pierces to the heart of what it means to be human. O'Sullivan can mock, satirize, and laugh, but he also finds dignity in unexpected places. He is interested in the art of living and in the borderland where truth and lies meet, both in life and in fiction itself.

God, she's just so good. She's the best. She kills me always, every time, and forever.' -Hera Lindsay Bird

At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends.

Offers a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy.

Urgent, witty and unnervingly beautiful, Oscar Upperton's first collection takes familiar language and makes it uncanny.

2000ft Above Worry Level begins on the sad part of the internet and ends at the top of a cliff face.

At the centre of this book-length poem is a sister's disappearance, and a peculiar inheritance: an obsession with pins. Pins held between the teeth to tell a fortune, a downpour of a thousand pins, precious pins borrowed for an art installation.

A father rollerblading to church in his ministerial robes, a university student in a leotard sprinting through fog, a trespass notice from Pak'nSave, a beautiful unborn goat in a jar . . .

Friday 13 March, 2015: Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Pam makes landfall with devastating consequences. Vanuatu is bruised but not broken.

Presenting thirty-five stories from seven collections published over more than forty years, Vincent O'Sullivan's Selected Stories is a milestone in the career of one of New Zealand's leading writers.

In Lay Studies, Steven Toussaint conducts an impressive range of lyric inventions, pitching his poems to that precarious interval between love and rage.

In Dead People I Have Known, the legendary New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer.

Broken down into three distinct parts, the book details Anderson's childhood, along with the years she spent primarily as a mother and the wife of a prominent naval officer, before concluding with her return to school and a renewal of the desire to write late in life.

The short stories in this collection follow characters that are plucked away from their normal lives to face wildly abnormal situations. An old coachman must face the death of his passenger; a missionary loses a colleague in the swollen waters of the Turakina River; a cranky ghost wreaks havoc on a Kapiti train; and a bloodied figure travels through time. From a reimagined history to a future where holograms walk the streets, these stories traverse time and genre to explore adventurous frontiers in the past, present, and future.

A young violin prodigy grows up in Harbin and Shanghai amidst the absurd and often deadly politics of mid-century China. Under the dual influences of her revolutionary parents and the White Russian intellectuals who are her tutors (and who provide her with a link, personal and tragic, to the composer Dmitri Shostakovich) she is drawn into a precarious world of ideology and espionage where music must serve not only 'the masses', but also the unpredictable whims and grand strategies of great leaders. Moving between China, Europe and New Zealand, the young protagonist learns how music and its artefacts link individuals across time in a chain alternately transcendent and tragic, and encounters the compromises that talent, fate and family force upon her.

The vignettes in these fresh, searing short stories, closely examine the complex male life. From a predatory act during a cross-country run in Fiordland to a doomed diving trip off Wellington's south coast, this collection combines emotional urgency with a surprising dose of humor to a great range of worlds. The result is a startlingly candid portraiture of the modern man.

Presents the first English translation of one of Mexican literature's classics. The Nahuas were the pre-Hispanic indigenous people of central Mexico and the Náhuatl literature presented in this collection conveys the customs, traditions, rituals, and beliefs of a culture with a very complex sociopolitical structure. These 14 stories were first collected by Pablo González Casanova in 1946, and this unique new edition presents the English translations facing the original Náhuatl texts.