Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves

Few novels can be described as truly original, but American author Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves deserves such an accolade. His debut novel, published in 2000, could loosely be described as Edgar Allan Poe meets Architectural Digest and Stephen King meets cinematographer Weekly. Photojournalist Will Navidson and his partner move into a small house with their two small children. In the best horror story/movie tradition the house contains a startling surprise - it is larger inside than out. Not only that, but the measurements regularly change. Doorways and staircases appear with seemingly infinite depth and scale. People are brought in to help solve the mystery by using film and sound recording. All manner of odd things soon occur. Typography in this novel reinforces the chaotic nature of the story and adds a dimension rarely encountered in the written word. Several typefaces are used, as well as a bewildering array of printing variations that run like secret passages throughout: text printed upside-down, sideways, or back-to-front, text in columns and boxes, leaves with just a single word on them, and a number of black and white illustrations. Publishers, Pantheon in the US, and Transworld in the UK deserve credit for the time and effort put into the printing. When bricks and mortar change shape and the printed word is not what it seems, the effect on the reader is unsettling and challenging. I found "House of Leaves" to be a truly remarkable read. Challenging yes, but well worth the effort. For those with an active imagination there are passages evoking a real sense of terror. More than mere purple prose, this novel is a psychological thriller with literary teeth, meticulously researched. The author uses his knowledge of cinematography to great effect, but has claimed that the novel will never make its way onto the big screen. I hope this is the case as the reader's imagination and fears are essential to the enjoyment of the story, and would be compromised by the limitations put on it by another's interpretation. This novel deserves to remain on paper, within its own house of leaves. Hard to Find Bookshops have several versions of this novel available for sale. Published as a paperback original by both US and UK publishers, we also have a limited supply of specially commissioned hardbacks. In 2000 Hard to Find Bookshops brought Mark Danielewski to New Zealand where he signed and dated many of the copies we have for sale. Check our listings for prices.
reviewed by Mark Baker

Michel Faber: The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber was born in Holland and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. In 1999, his book of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award. His brilliant first novel, Under the Skin, published in 2000, was nominated for the Whitbread First Novel Award and has since been translated into several languages. It looks set to become a cult classic.
Following Under the Skin were two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps and The Courage Consort.
In 2002 Canongate published Faber's monumental novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, which, at over 800 pages, falls into the literary realm of the Victorian era it portrays, though Dickensian London is clearly described by a 21st century pen. The novel centres on the relationship between Sugar, a 19 year old prostitute with novel-writing aspirations, and William Rackham, a married perfume manufacturer. The use of modern vernacular lends an edginess to the characters, and Faber often surprises with enigmatic phrases, such as the opening lines "Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them." These directives guided this reader - absorbed, amused, and admiring - from cover to cover.
reviewed by Mark Baker

Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan

Terence Alan "Spike" Milligan (1918-2002)

A continuing bafflement at the absurdity of the world
"Spike was entirely his own mad Irish self. He came out of nowhere. If there is a definition of genius it is that whatever province you are in, you leave it different. He left comedy different and it was never the same after him." Stephen Fry.
Spike Milligan, a household name since the 1950s, was one of Britain's most respected performers, known to millions as one of the founding members of The Goons. He also wrote the scripts for the show, which were collected in: Goon Show Scripts and More Goon Show Scripts. His fascination with language and the surreal qualities of everyday life broke new ground in humour. He worked in virtually every medium -- radio, TV, film, music -- and numerous writing disciplines: poetry, novel, biography, letters and articles. In 1998 his nonsense verse On The Ning Nang Nong (Silly Verse for Kids, 1959)was voted the UK's favourite comic poem. A complete collection of his works would run to nearly 100 volumes. His Irish trilogy of novels took 37 years to write, starting with Puckoon in 1963, continuing with The Looney -- An Irish Fantasy (1987) and concluded in 2000 with The Murphy. He wrote 7 war biographies, starting with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971). He also wrote a series of According to ... books, reworking classics such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Robin Hood, with hilarious results. Plagued with mental illness during his life, he suffered no fewer than ten breakdowns, linked to shell shock he endured during the war. In 1994 he produced Depression and How to Survive It which he wrote with British psychiatrist Anthony Clare. During a live television show in 1994, Milligan made fun of his friend and admirer, Prince Charles, calling him "a grovelling little bastard". Milligan later sent a fax to the prince saying: "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question now?" Shortly before his death in 2002, Milligan received an honorary knighthood from Prince Charles - honorary because Milligan was not British. Joining the tributes that flowed following Milligan’s death, Prince Charles said: " Personally, but along with so many others, I shall miss his irreverent and hysterical presence and can only say that the world really will be the poorer for his departure."

Dr Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel 1904 - 1991)

The "obsolete children" at Hard to Find Books would like to say hoorah hooray to Dr Seuss. You may not know this, but New Zealand is a Dr Seuss stronghold. In the 1960s we bought more Seuss books per capita than anywhere else in the world. So it is fitting to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth (in the USA) of our beloved Dr Seuss, who showed millions the delights of learning to read English. His quirky and subversive sense of humour produced what Maurice Sendak described as "great big noisy books with noisy pictures and noisy language." He wrote bestsellers campaigning against the arms race, prejudice, pollution and greed, as well as conducting a life-long war on illiteracy.
His books for children began in 1937 with And To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street. After The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, came Horton the gentle elephant in 1940 with Horton Hatches the Egg, and again in 1954 with Horton Hears a Who!. The Cat in the Hat appeared in 1957 following a request to write from a list of only 225 key words a "story that first-graders can't put down." It was a big hit with children, who nagged their parents to buy it. The Cat became the symbol for Beginner Books, a division of Random House, with Dr Seuss as its president and editor-in-chief. Green Eggs and Ham, (1960) was the result of a bet with publisher Bennet Cerf. Could Dr Seuss write a book with a vocabulary of only 50 words for the very beginning of beginning readers? Dr Seuss won the bet and Green Eggs became his "bestest seller." Dr Seuss and Beginner Books produced a steady stream of quirky books throughout the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. He used the name Theo Le Sieg, his last name spelt backwards, for the 14 books he wrote but did not illustrate. He talked to his young audience about race relations (The Sneetches and Other Stories, 1961), environmental concerns (The Lorax, 1971) and even nuclear war (The Butter Battle Book, 1984). Dr Seuss died in his sleep in September, 1991. While the stories are timeless, his readers grow old along with him. One of his last books Oh the Places You Will Go (1990) is a wise catalogue of what to expect in the wide world (and perhaps beyond). It immediately struck a chord and spent over 2 years on the New York Times’ adult bestseller list.

Elizabeth Knox: The Vintner's Luck

Elizabeth Knox, New Zealand novelist, was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in 1999. She is the author of 11 books. Her literary success is, writes Margie Thomson, "testimony to the rewards of letting a child's imagination wander freely."
"Through her childhood and young adulthood she was enmeshed in the pleasures of her own and her sisters' fantasies through the imaginary games they used to play. Worlds were created, characters invented, epic dramas unfolded, sometimes over years. The book began when Knox, delirious with pneumonia, dreamed she was on an island off the coast of California, having a conversation with an angel who told her that the most important relationship of his life had been with a French vintner between the years 1808 and 1863. She hasn't been to Burgundy, but fiction, she says, is about transplanting the details you know - the kind of trees that grow there, the stone walls, the vineyards, all of which can be gleaned from photographs - around the unfamiliar and imagined things. For the history, one writes and then checks."
The Vintner's Luck
An irresistible story of love, wine and angels - the tale of a man, his vineyards and angelic husbandry in nine teeth-century France. Burgundy 1808. One night Sobran Jodeau meets an angel in his vineyard: a physically gorgeous creature with huge wings that smell of snow, a sense of humor and an inquiring mind. Every year on the midsummer anniversary of the date, they meet again. Village life goes on, meantime, with its affairs and mysteries, marriages and murders, and the vintages keep improving - through the horror of the Napoleonic wars, and into the middle of the century, as science marches on, viticulture changes, and gliders fly like angels.
"Original, often astonishingly vivid...Xas is one of the best angels since William Blake's."--Nina Auerbach, The New York Times Book Review

Jacket photo: Chris Frazer Smith

Kitty Aldridge: POP

Kitty Aldridge was born in Bahrain in 1962. She trained as an actress in London and has since worked in film, theatre and television as an actress and writer.
POP is her first novel.
“Kitty Aldridge is a real discover, a writer of precision, delicacy and wit, and her first novel is a rare delight.”
Salman Rushdie

POP
At thirteen, after her mother’s death, Maggie goes to live with her grandfather, Pop. It is the long hot British summer of 1975. Pop is focused on the upcoming annual pub quiz at the Fox and Dogs. Maggie dreams of her dead mother and her absent father, who left years ago for a new life as a rhinestone cowboy in the American west.
“They are two lonely, bereft souls scraping through each day, with grit, resilience and humor… Kitty Aldridge has a vivid cinematic touch. She captures perfectly the listlessness of adolescent summertimes and the hot torpor of 1970s suburbs.”  Adam Rae-Reeves

Jacket photo: Michael Wildsmith

Eleanor Bailey: Idioglossia

Eleanor Bailey is a writer and journalist. She lives in London and Cologne.
Idioglossia is her first novel.
Bailey plays with the definitions of "idioglossia" -- a private or secret language shared by a few people, the babble of babies, the murmur of lunatics -- then digs deeper to discuss the words we use in public as distinct from the words we use with family and friends, the secret codes lovers use, evolving cyber-tongues and computerese, and those unspoken linguistic connections that we make using our bodies.” Jeffery Canton
In Idioglossia, Bailey tells the stories of four generations of an oddball family, focusing on the women.
Spiteful Great Edie reigns over her family from her squalid house. Grace, her only surviving daughter, has spent years in a mental institution. Maggie, Grace's child, holds the family together, coping with Edie's malice, her mother's illness and her own guilt at having been an unsuccessful single mother. Meanwhile Sarah, daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter, is angry, unhappy and the last of the line.
Their lives are stirred up by the return of Rudi, holocaust survivor and Grace’s father. He is hoping for reconciliation with Maggie and their daughter, whom he deserted years before.

Jacket photo: Brown Brothers

Desmond Barry: The Chivalry of Crime

Desmond Barry was born and brought up in Wales. He moved to the US in the mid 80s. He spent several summers in Tibet and is presently External Fellow of Glamorgan University.
Of his novel, Barry writes: "We have to admit to ourselves that guns and violence are fascinating and that we all have those seeds of mayhem and despair that will bear bitter fruit if we deny them and don't examine them and find a way to safely bring them to light." (“The Story Behind The Chivalry of Crime”)
The Chivalry of Crime was voted Best First Novel of the Year by The Western Writers of America and shortlisted for the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award. This is the story of one of America’s most compelling figures, outlaw gunslinger Jesse James. Bringing real and invented characters together, the novel mingles the life of an ordinary boy with a factually accurate account of Jesse James and Robert Ford, the man who killed James. The story of Joshua, "a would-be shootist who owned no gun", the outlaw, James, and his “assassin”, Ford, unmask painful realities behind America’s most cherished myths.
Peter Carey (with whom Barry studied at Columbia) described it as “gritty, powerfully alive … The Chivalry of Crime is a tour de force, deserving of every accolade that comes its way.”

Jacket photo: Mark Pennington

Dai Sijie: Balzac and the little chinese Seamstress

Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954.
He is a film maker who was himself "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974, and left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived ever since. This, his first novel, was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000, became an immediate bestseller and won five prizes. Rights to the novel have been sold in twenty-five countries.
Balzac and the little chinese Seamstress
In 1971 Mao´s campaign against the intellectuals is at his height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be "re-educated". The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous, foggy paths. Their true re-education starts however, when they discover a comrade´s hidden stash of classic great nineteenth-century Western literature - Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They need all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, but when they do their lives are turned upside down.

Jacket illustration: Jackie Parsons

John Baxer: A Pound of Paper

John Baxer is a novelist and broadcaster as well as being a hugely acclaimed film critic and film biographer. His subjects have included Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. His most recent biography is of Robert de Niro.
In the rural Australia of the fifties where John Baxter grew up, reading books was regarded with suspicion, owning and collection them with utter incomprehension. Despite this, by the age of eleven Baxter had "collected" his first book - The Poems of Rupert Brooke. He'd read the volume often, but now he had to own it.
This was the beginning of what would become a major collection and a lifelong obsession.
A Pound of Paper
In this brilliantly readable and funny book, John Baxter brings us into contact with such literacy greats as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. But he also shows us how he penetrated the secret fraternity of "runners" or book scouts - sleuths who use bluff and guile to hunt down their quarry - and joined them scouring junk shops, markets, auction rooms and private homes for rarities. In the comic tradition of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, A Pound of Paper describes how a boy from the bush came to be living in paris penthouse with a library worth millions. It also explores the exploding market in first editions. What treasures are lying unnoticed in your garage?
We have the first edition available signed and inscribed by John Baxter for NZ$ 125.00 or unsigned for NZ$ 70.00.

A.S. Byatt: The Biographer's Tale

A. S. Byatt
One of England's foremost writers, A. S. Byatt was educated at York and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She taught at the Central School of Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before returning to full-time writing in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she was appointed a C.B.E. in 1990.
Her novel Possession won the Booker Prize and Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1990. Her other fiction includes Babel Tower, Angels and Insects, A Whistling Women, The Matisse Stories, and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. Her critical works include Degrees of Freedom, a study of the novels of Iris Murdoch, and Passions of the Mind (selected essays).
The Biographer's Tale
In The Biographer's Tale, a disillusioned student, Phineas G., sets out to write a biography of a great biographer. But a 'whole life' is hard to find. How do we put the idea of a person together? Everywhere Phineas looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected typescripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Trails run cold and mysteries are unresolved.