THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Back for its fourth year World of Words celebrates diverse and exciting voices and is designed to inspire people to think, talk, laugh, listen and learn. The 2020 sessions are a mixture of speakers, interviews, book sessions, poetry slams and comedy.  We've done a quick scan and a super excited to see that musicians will be high on the list this year, including Shayne Carter and Mike Chunn. It's not quite ready yet but when it is you can check out the schedule here:  https://www.womad.co.nz/schedules/ In the meantime the full list of performers at WOMAD's World of Words: Chessie Henry - Book Club Chessie Henry is the author of We Can Make A Life, a family memoir which was recently awarded the E.H. McCormick prize for General Non-Fiction at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Along with published works on The Spinoff and The Wireless Chessie has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters. We Can Make A Life is the book chosen ...

The CoffeeBar Kid talks to Charlotte Yates about her new project, setting Katherine Mansfield’s poems to music. This interview opens with a snippet from Wounded Bird , by Wellington group French for Rabbits. This is a poem set to music, and it’s the first single from a new album called Mansfield . The album is the fourth in an ad hoc series of projects curated by Wellington based composer, musical director and teacher Charlotte Yates. The album will be the first contemporary music album dedicated to her poetry, and gives a fresh focus to the ever intriguing, multi-faceted literary icon, Katherine Mansfield, with jazz to spoken word, soul to alt country, creating beautiful and emotive songs which illuminating her words for all to hear. Yates was also responsible for corralling a whole cache of musicians and singers to compose music around the poems of James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare and Whiti Ihamaera. Now she turns her sights on our capitals’ own beloved author. Due out in the fir...

"It's been said Janis Joplin was second only to Bob Dylan," write the publishers, "as the 'creator-recorder-embodiment of her generation's mythology'. But how did a middle-class girl from Texas become a '60s countercultural icon?  The CoffeeBar Kid reads this new account and finds himself plunged into a world of hedonism, drugs and the emergence of a new kind of feminist rock star. Janis Joplin was born in 1943 and grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She began singing in bars and coffeehouses, first locally, then in Austin, where she spent most of a year at the University of Texas. In 1966, she went to San Francisco and got together with a rock band in search of a singer. Big Brother and the Holding Company. The following summer Big Brother performed at the Monterey Pop Festival; Janis got raves from the fans and the critics and from then on she was a star. ‘Cheap Thrills’, Big Brother’s first major album (there had been an early record on a small...

Bejing born writer An Yu's debut novel is a beguiling and bewitching read, full of poetry and realist magic. One morning in autumn, just after breakfast, Jia Jia finds her husband dead in the bathtub of their Beijing apartment. Next to him is a piece of folded paper, a sketch of a strange creature from his dream. He has left her no other sign. Young, alone, and with many unanswered questions, Jia Jia sets out to discover what this this mysterious clue might mean. From the high-rises to the hidden bars of contemporary Beijing, she crosses paths with people who call the city home, including someone who may be able to offer her the love she had long thought impossible. Her journey takes her to the high plains of Tibet, and even to a shadowy, watery otherworld, a place she both yearns for and fears. This book is cinematic, dreamlike, sureal at times and very beautiful.  It's an exploration of myth-making, of loss, love (or at least repect of loved ones and those we should ...