Marginalia
Brief, considered reviews of the books and writing currently shaping our thinking.
A Visual Feast: Ingredients that make a home by Jono Fleming
Gifting a book at Christmas and hoping the recipient likes it will depend a lot on the first impression it makes and this book is a crowd pleaser - a visual feast, if you will. Smith Street Books, from Thames & Hudson, know how to do beautiful books (see Opa!). Set out like a recipe book for your home, Fleming takes you through eight courses, book ended by an aperitivo and digestivo. From light, which is “to interiors what seasoning is to food,” and the spice of life that is colour, to texture, culture and story, there’s a world of influence Jono guides you through to help you master an interior that tells you and your home’s story. Of the eight houses profiled, the one to look out for is in Marrakech’s Medina, where the art, objects, colours and layers are like therapy for the complacent. The story and light-soaked photography that beams off the page will snap you out of being content to purely exist in your home, rather it will encourage you to do things in your home you’ve never dared do before.
Publisher: Smith Street Books, $70
Unity Books
Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination by Karen Hao
According to Shoshana Zuboff, author of the OG book on AI, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Karen Hao has revealed the “historical significance and societal consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI spectacle, even as she meticulously documents a company and its leader hellbent on getting there first with no idea where they are going.” With the unparalleled journalistic skill of someone who was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal focused on AI & China, and a senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, Hao shows us, the mere mortals of the tech world, the more sinister intentions of Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Opening with the gripping moment the board fired Altman from his own company to the growth, expansion and subsequent moral corruption that extreme wealth and competition brings, this is, finally, a timeless piece on the ever changing tech-world that isn’t going to be out of date by the time the paperback reaches our shelves. If you’re intrigued, terrified, or even excited by AI and our future living with it - this is for you. It will take you all summer to read and you’ll be all the more informed and less terrified for it.
Publisher: Allen Lane, $70
Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades
“She drinks coffee until she can drink wine and then she goes to sleep so that she can wake up and drink coffee until she can drink wine again. Is this not the story of every mother?” Does that sound like your wife? Or your Mum? I write these reviews with men in mind, as is the predominant readership of Crane Brothers Dispatch, but as it’s nearing Christmas I imagine you’re in the market for an Aotearoa-centric work of thought-provoking non-fiction that you can gift the woman in your life along with a slice of freedom with me on December 6th at 17:45 at the Frame Gallery in Herne Bay. This essay collection is poetically built on unsent love letters to an admired writer (how Chris Kraus), laughably archaic parenting advice from OG Plunket founder Truby King, and vignettes on trying to write essays among the debris of early motherhood. This collection is an exceptional homage to the impossible standards women put upon themselves while trying to maintain any semblance of creative identity from Lynley Edmeades - published poet, current editor of Landfall, and Otago University lecturer. Join me at the gallery, it’ll be fun.
Publisher: Otago University Press, $35
Folly Journal 003
If you prefer to peruse something literary that’s not a book but instead a prolific assortment of disruptive, tantalising and dazzling poetry, essays and art from a carefully crafted international talent pool - Folly Journal is for you. The two-woman editorial team accepts a mere 0.6% of submissions, demonstrating their popularity and exceptional taste. They’ve ploughed onto Aotearoa’s literary scene, taken their Wellington glitz to the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, and won an assortment of prizes. Famed critic of Reading Room, Steve Braunius, said it has "some of the best New Zealand writing I’ve read all year” and hailed it as a “strange new journal with short fiction, short essays and short poems, aimed at people with short attention spans and zero interest in what the so-called literary establishment considers good writing”. Plus they’re becoming famous for their debauchery-fuelled launch parties and I can concur after experiencing one last weekend that they are indeed fabulous. All hail Folly.
Publisher: Folly, $35
Miss Cat by Jean-luc Fromental & Joëlle Jolive
This graphic novel series has the seal of approval from the iconic cartoonist, Posy Simmonds. They’ll take your tamariki’s imaginations to places they’ve never ventured to before! The plots are wonderfully silly and testament to authors Joëlle Jolivet and Jean-Luc Fromental’s ability to access that unusual corner of the imagination that most adults find impenetrable without mushrooms. The Case Of The Curious Canary sees Mr Maximus report his canary missing when after much detective work Miss Cat discovers that in fact the canary, wait for it, isn’t who everyone thinks he is. And so a story of crooks, animal magic and conspiracy unfolds. In book two, The Gnome's Nightmare, Miss Cat has to try and stop a nightmare from coming true and a trail of clues and hints takes her to a secret author and a pack of peculiar pirates. Finally, in the third and final in the series, The Mystery Of The Melting Snow , Miss Cat has a case of whodunnit to solve on her hands as the snow in the ski resort of Snoboll melts at night and magically reappears the next morning. It’s the ultimate Christmas case and this book has brought me as much joy as the 4 year old I’m reading to at night. Each sold separately.
Publisher: Thames & Hudson, from $22
We Go to the Park by Sara Stridsberg and Beatrice Alemagna
Unruly Books (an imprint of Enchanted Lion Books) is a publisher where art and literature for teenagers and adults converge. They call themselves “sophisticated picture books,” and indeed they are - I wish I could tear the pages out and frame them all. Booker-longlisted author Stridsberg, alongside Alemagna, takes the park as a place where the usual rules don’t apply, time becomes irrelevant, and imagination, invention, observation and chance take hold. Play becomes the embodiment of freedom and expression and through this deep connections are made in chance encounters. It’s a philosophical book written in poetic prose that has been translated from Swedish, and while the story appears child-like it also serves as a reminder to adult readers in particular “of the everyday miracle contained in encountering another consciousness.” Look at this as your teens' possible foray into poetry and painting. I imagine it being that book they mention in adulthood when they’re curating their first solo-show, or launching their poetry book.
Publisher: Unruly, $40
How to Live an Artful Life by Katy Hessel
Parts of the artworld are being a bit wanky about Katy Hessel and I’m obsessed with how her popularity is proving provocative. Eddy Frankel in The Guardian takes a cynical approach to "celebrity art historian” Katy (or if you’re not feeling emasculated just art historian, curator, lecturer and alumna of Forbes under 30), proclaiming “I have been a full-time, professional art critic for most of my adult life. I spend my days in galleries, surrounded by art, reading about it, absorbing it” (alright, chill out Eddy) and then goes on to parody Katy’s book before admitting "I’m not in an especially good mental place: I have no work lined up for the next three months…” - what I’ve deduced is Eddy is jealous, using sarcasm under the guise of humour to mock a woman rising in the ranks and probably took no issue to the Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday. How to Live an Artful Life is 366 inspirations from artists such as Maggie Hambling, Leonora Carrington, Ursula Le. Guin, Yayoi Kusama and beyond, raising the profile of prolific, under-celebrated female artists. With artworks throughout and short artist biographies in the footnotes, all this hardback is going to do is inform and bring joy - unlike Eddy’s review.
Publisher: Hutchinson Heinemann, $40
Out of the Blue: Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985 - 2021 by Christina Barton
Art historian Christina Barton and publishing house THWUP are the surgeons operating on the rapidly declining beat of Art History’s heart. In Out of the Blue, 37 of Barton’s essays written between 1985 and 2021, complimented by colour illustrations, document the evolution of Aotearoa’s art scene and the artists that inhabited it. She writes on artists she’s thought about, worked with, and written for, from Bill Hammond to Rita Angus, amongst lesser known artists. She offers a perspective that perfectly balances the quotidian with the exceptionally complex detail of the artists and their work in a style of writing one could only dream of. This isn’t just a chance to read the extraordinary calibre of her art criticism, but to discover or rediscover some of Aotearoa’s artists whose brilliance demands a propping up every once in a while to keep them in the cultural lexicon. It’s a bonus too if it stands as a reminder to our gover
nment that unlike our esteemed national airline this country doesn’t operate on KPIs, and Art History is integral to our national culture, profitably so or not. Viva la Art History. Ka pai Christina, art-writer extraordinaire.
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka Press, $50
