THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Beautifully written and illustrated with maps and stunning photography, Katherine Mansfields Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield's journals and letters, Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and a century ago this year died. "Since her death in 1923,"writes author and self-confessed Mansfield-o-phile, Redmer Yska, "a host of biographers and scholars have fixed Mansfield's place in and impact on the English-speaking literary world, her fellowship with the Bloomsbury ring, her distinctive contribution to literary modernism.  Too little, "he reasons has been written about her European wellheads, the places across the Continent where she lived, was inspired, searched for - and recorded - lost time. " Nor," he reminds us, "have we learned much about her startling celebrity in interwar France, h...

Pull Down The Shades/Garage Fanzine 1984-86 / Langston Journalist Richard Langston was once the original zine-maker! 42 years on from his earliest foray into publishing he's collected his much loved fanzine 'Garage' into a book, chronicling one of Aotearoa music's most creative and explosive periods - the South Island 80's scene dubbed the Dunedin Sound (although we'd have to include Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in that summary). If you watch TV3 and TVNZ you'll know his name and voice well.  He even appears regularly on Country Calendar.  But before his illustrious TV career, Langston worked as a print journalist for the majors in Christchurch and Dunedin, during the early 80's, whilst sneaking into the office to use their photocopiers, moonlighting as the proprietor, editor and publisher of an ultra-obscure music fanzine called 'Garage'.  During the 1980's in Wellington,as fledgling DJs on Radio Active,  we passed around 'Garag...

170+ (including authors, illustrators, journalists, academics and industry figures) experts determined what they consider the 100 greatest children’s books of all time.  Each 'expert' was asked to choose their what they considered their top 10 favourites.  Each book was given up to 10 points, dependent on how high they were ranked by the expert. Then an aggregated score determined the final ranking.   “The end result is a list that reflects the vast scope of children’s literature through the eras, standing as a tribute to its boundless imagination, thrilling storytelling, and profound themes — from the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian children’s stories dating back to the 2nd Century B.C.E., to the newest book in the list, ‘A Kind of Spark,’ published in 2020,”   BBC Culture . "Of course," the website goes on to say, "the list is not designed as a fait accompli, but rather as an inspiration for further discovery and debate." Go online and have your say,...