The BPANZ Book Design Awards 2008 shortlist was announced today, with a list dominated by beautiful books with eco-friendly themes and a social conscience. Read more »

Revelation By C J Sansom

Macmillan, $38, Reviewed by ANDREA JUTSON

C J Sansom’s Shardlake series is not only a vividly realistic chronicle of Tudor England, but an engrossing set of whodunnits to boot.
In his fourth Matthew Shardlake book, Revelation, the hunchbacked lawyer faces his most terrifying opponent yet – a madman who is killing lapsed Protestants in ever more gruesome ways. Read more »

Sarah Delahunty’s First Gear Productions performs a set of stories adapted from the book “A Nest of Singing Birds: 100 Years of the School Journal”, written by Greg O’Brien at the National Library Wellington on Wednesday 4 June. Read more »

Poem of the Week: Pearls

From: It Matters that We Were Young Together by Diana Deans
Steele Roberts $20

Read more »

The Gorse Blooms Pale: Dan Davin’s Southland Stories
Edited By Janet Wilson

Otago University Press $50 Reviewed By BRIAN POTIKI

Dan Davin was eleven when James Joyce’s Dubliners was published. In the last of these short stories “The Dead” we are told of its restless protagonist Gabriel Conroy:
The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque.
He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly-printed books. Read more »

By Tim Bollinger

I’m not one for justifying comic books as worthy literature on the grounds that they are now “graphic novels” and have an adult audience. Just about all my favourite comic books I fell in love with when I was a child. Here’s a few of my favourites. Read more »

SRB Picks of the Week 15 May 08

:By Jeremy Rose

In this week’s SRB picks: Kiwi writers getting noticed in Britain, Istanbul city of sleuths, Fritzl’s fictional forebears and Auckland’s Writers and Readers Festival gets underway. Read more »

In Continents by Otago poet Richard Reeve will be launched during Invercargill’s May Arts Month Festival. Read more »

Victoria University criminologist Dr Jan Jordan’s latest book explores what it means to survive an experience often described as ‘every woman’s worst nightmare’. Read more »

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz

Faber and Faber Reviewed :By Jeremy Rose

I can think of no other book – and definitely no other novel – that I would recommend for the footnotes alone. Read more »