SHORT TAKES ON RECENT SIGNIFICANT NZ FICTION

WITI IHIMAERA – HIS BEST SHORT STORIES
Witi Ihimaera – Raupo - $30

The author selects his personal choice of 24 stories from his long & illustrious career going back to the very first publication, Pounamu Pounamu in 1972.
Terrific stuff and an especially good introduction for anyone who doesn’t know his short fiction.
But it should have been published in a larger format as the type face is so tiny it is for daytime reading only

ESSENTIAL NEW ZEALAND SHORT STORIES
Selected by Owen Marshall –Vintage - $39.99

Owen Marshall is of course the doyen of NZ short story writers so who better to make an “essential” selection. Interestingly the Witi Ihimaera story he has selected is A Game of Cards which is also the opening story in Ihimaera’s own selection mentioned above.
These stories, (following Marshall’s useful six page introduction), some 50 of them, cover the spectrum from Katherine Mansfield right through to Eleanor Catton and all the expected writers that have come between.
A chunky book with a nice feel to it, definitely one for the bookshelf.

THE ADVENTURES OF VELA
Albert Wendt – Huia Publishers - $35

The novel, written in verse, is a Pacific epic that stretches from hundreds of
years before the arrival of Papalagi to the present day and uses the great indigenous oral traditions of storytelling and Western poetry. Vela, the main character, is a poet,
songmaker and chronicler, who tells his life to a modern
poet, Alapati, who writes it down.

Albert Wendt, a premier writer and scholar of the Pacific, is Professor Emeritus of English at the
University of Auckland and former University of Hawai‘i Citizens’ Chair in English (2004—2008). He received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Hawai‘i in May 2009.