NZ Fiction : NZ Short Stories

ISBN: 9781843545521
Title: 44 Things My Year at Home
Author: GUNN KIRSTY

'In 44 Things' Kirsty Gunn celebrates marriage, friendship and motherhood. She presents a mosaic of personal reflections written over the course of one year in moments stolen from the vibrant and chaotic world that inspired them.

Format: Hardback
Price: $45.00

ISBN: 9780994106995
Title: Abyssinian Mountain Lion & Other Stories
Author: MCDOUGALL DAVID

David McDougall reintroduces the reader to that most excellent thing: the good yarn.Meet the neighbour with a war history who cant help interfering with goings-on over the fence, a woman on a train wholl go to any lengths to clear her student debt, a bunch of mates on a hunting trip who fear dire consequences after shooting a fantail, and a retired husband whose wife irons his shorts for Valentines Day and leaves him perplexed about how to return the favour.As for the Abyssinian mountain lion, is there even such a thing?These are stories of humour and melancholy, love and vice.

David McDougall spent 25 years in a successful Wellington business before training as a social worker, and family therapist, and working with children in the mental health field, the Outward Bound Trust and Family Court.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781775500377
Title: Ancestry
Author: WENDT ALBERT

Albert Wendt's new collection of short stories explores the nature of family, tradition and culture through the eyes of those seemingly caught between the realities of modern contemporary life and the ancestral ties of their heritage. With a deft touch, he draws us into his characters' lives and with equal parts wisdom and wit, he exposes them to us. This is a masterful meditation on the ties that bind people together across time and place.

Format: Trade paperback
Price: $35.00

ISBN: 9780864739216
Title: Astonished Dice (Collected Short Stories)
Author: COCHRANE GEOFF

Geoff Cochrane is the author of numerous highly regarded collections of poems and two novels. In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, and in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award. Astonished Dice collects his two slim volumes of short stories, originally published in limited editions, the early novella 'Quest Clinic', and more recent stories.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781869405892
Title: AUP Anthology of NZ Literature
Author: STAFFORD JANE & WILLIAMS MARK (EDITORS)

‘What, after all, is the truth of a place that has only just been worked into language?’

From Polynesian Mythology to the Yates’ Garden Guide, from Allen Curnow to Alice Tawhai, from Jessie Mackay to Alison Wong, from Julius Vogel to Albert Wendt, from the letters of Wiremu Te Rangikaheke to the notebooks of Katherine Mansfield – Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika, and Asian New Zealanders have struggled for two and a half centuries to work the English language into some sort of truth about this place. The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature brings together for the first time in one volume this country’s major writing, from the earliest records of exploration and encounter to the globalised, multicultural present.

Editors Jane Stafford and Mark Williams range across novels and stories, poems and plays, letters and diaries, comics and songs to collect the defining stuff of our literary heritage. The contents will delight and provoke: Erewhon and The Heart of the Bush; Man Alone and ‘No Ordinary Sun’; The God Boy and Hicksville; ‘The Gumboot Song’ and The Vintner’s Luck. Through an imaginative selection and illuminating introductions, Stafford and Williams provide new paths into our writing and our country. For students and readers, at home and overseas, the Anthology of New Zealand Literature will be the indispensable introduction for years to come to what’s worth reading and why.


Format: Hardback
Price: $75.00

ISBN: 9781775502982
Title: Black Ice Matter
Author: COLE GINA

This collection of short stories explores connections between extremes of heat and cold. Sometimes this is spatial or geographical; sometimes it is metaphorical. Sometimes it involves juxtapositions of time; sometimes heat appears where only ice is expected.

In the stories, a woman is caught between traditional Fijian ways and the brutality of the military dictatorship; a glaciology researcher falls into a crevasse and confronts the unexpected; two women lose children in freak shooting accidents; a young child in a Barbie Doll sweatshop dreams of a different life; secondary school girls struggle with secrets about an addicted janitor; and two women take a deathly trip through a glacier melt stream. These are some of the unpredictable stories in this collection that follow themes of ice and glaciers in the heat of the South Pacific and take us into unusual lives and explorations.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781927145982
Title: Bonsai: Best Small Stories from Aotearoa NZ
Author: ELVY MICHELLE, MCMILLAN FRANKIE & NORCLIFFE JAMES

‘Bonsai’ brings together a pioneering collection of flash fiction and associated forms (prose poetry and haibun) from 165 writers in Aotearoa New Zealand, along with intriguing essays on this increasingly popular genre. In 200 small stories of no more than 300 words, where the translucent boundaries between prose and poetry are often transgressed, we discover a vast array of human experience. Here, children race snails, shoot tin cans, learn to fly, and look for Antarctica in a drain pipe, while Schrödinger’s cat dreams of life and death, a dog licks away a woman’s tears, and a peacock guards its human family. Family tensions spill over during trips to the beach, couples get together and fall apart, babies are born – or not born – and parents die. You might find yourself dancing like the cool kids, listening to a neighbour sing in the dark, or watching a tractor catch fire. There are perfect moments in miniature as dew falls on a spider’s web and strangers make eye contact. Composed with precision in a form where every word counts, these carefully chiselled works are provocative, tender and endlessly surprising.

Format: Paperback
Price: $40.00

ISBN: 9781877276101
Title: Calling the Fish & Other Stories
Author: BROWN DAVID LYNDON


Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780473305499
Title: Daffy & Her Niece Who Doesn't Talk
Author: WILSON JAMES G. & WILSON VAL


Format: Hardback
Price: $40.00

ISBN: 9781776560585
Title: Deleted Scenes for Lovers
Author: SLAUGHTER TRACEY

"The knowledge of everyone they’re about to hurt is not an element easy to breathe in. They’re the lovers. You can blame them now, if you want to. That’s your choice: this is the director’s cut."



Seventeen powerful stories of contemporary New Zealand life from a writer whose penetrating gaze reveals the full experience of her characters' lives—tragic, comic, rich.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781869421144
Title: Double Act Intrigues & Amuses
Author: CHERRY FRANCES & FAGAN ANNABEL


Format: Paperback
Price: $32.00

ISBN: 9780947493059
Title: Dreamers: Nga Kaimoamoea: Stories of the Hokianga
Author: POINTON SUSY

The Hokianga Harbour on New Zealand's Far North West Coast has been a magnet for dreamers ever since the first Polynesian explorer, Kupe, followed a long-tailed cuckoo into the southern ocean in the hope that he would find land. These stories are about the dreamers that have followed him ever since.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780864739186
Title: Empty Bones & Other Stories
Author: DUKES BRETON

Empty Bones is weightlifting, infidelity, drunk driving, facelifts and childbirth - it's a family and their weekend reunion. It is Lisbon to Madrid on the night train and Auckland to Wellington on a motorbike. It is the end, the beginning and the gristly in between. Empty Bones is a novella accompanied by five equally raw, intense and comical short stories, from the author of the acclaimed Bird North.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781869790073
Title: Etiquette for a Dinner Party
Author: ORR SUE

An ageing taxi driver reflects on mortality and the choices he has made in life as he indulges in a clandestine Italian feast. The friend of a dying woman delivers a sardonic commentary on the frenetic ritual of cake-baking that precedes death and grief. A young boy sets out to save his grandparents' marriage after discovering pornography in his grandfather's memorabilia. This stunning debut collection observes a subtle unravelling of social etiquettes. Often hopeful, always moving, these darkly quirky stories demand the reader's attention beyond the final page. Etiquette for a Dinner Party showcases the breadth of this new writer's talent - from the oh-so-recognisable and desperate efforts of a homesick tourist to enjoy the 'perfect' holiday, to the descent into madness of a lonely high-country farmer. Varied and accomplished, this book is entertaining, stimulating and original.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780864736253
Title: Everything We Hoped For
Author: ADAM PIP

An unusually strong first book, this collection of short stories depends on exquisitely crafted surfaces that conceal shocking emotional force. Three of the stories are obliquely connected and feature young women on the edge. In the first of these, a new mother contemplates her new baby; in the second, a girl finds herself in rehab; and in the final story, the main character goes to jail. Other characters include a New Zealand serviceman returned from active duty in Dili, the employees of a $2 shop, and a vegan couple at a Samoan resort.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780473119805
Title: Fika First Draft Pasefika Writers


Format: Stapled
Price: $25.00

ISBN: 9780908790715
Title: Fooling
Author: DUCKWORTH MARILYN

A novella in the Hazard Short Fiction series. Ros is addicted to falling in love, despite her cynicism. Although she knows it is a mistake, she finds herself involved with Neil, and strange things begin to occur: children are left on the doorstep, racehorses need operations, boxes begin to fill the shed. Ros visits the Widow Casey for help, but this leads to more problems.

Format: Paperback
Price: $10.00

ISBN: 9780864735591
Title: For Everyone Concerned
Author: WILKINS DAMIEN

This exhilarating mixture of fables, satires, notes to self and short shorts will further enhance Wilkins's reputation as one of the most daring and innovative of New Zealand's leading writers.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781869790578
Title: From Under the Overcoat
Author: ORR SUE

A collection of new stories (all accessible, emotive, vivid), each celebrating and saluting a remarkable short story from times past. The new stories are modern and entertaining in their own right - this collection can be read purely for the pleasure in that; however, it can also be read for the way each story explores elements from important stories from the past. As such, this book celebrates the short-story form and earlier writers, it offers a guessing game for readers to work out exactly which stories are being drawn on and points us back to these earlier works and to the changes that time has brought in the way we view them. It offers up a canon of influential short stories (with notes on each), with particular appeal to schools and universities. So what on one level is a stunning collection of short stories also offers numerous other levels.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780062490490
Title: Garden Party & Other Stories
Author: MANSFIELD KATHERINE

Introduction by Colm Toibin

In fifteen funny, colorful, poignant and mysterious stories, the irreverent modernist Katherine Mansfield, a friend and contemporary of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, examines a range of themes integral to the human experience, from marriage, family, and death to duty, disillusionment, and regret in this commanding collection, part of the Ecco Art of the Story series.

Written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield s tragically short life in the chaotic years after World War I, the fifteen stories in The Garden Party are as fresh, perceptive, and vivid today as they were nearly a century ago. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand while others take place in England or on the French Riviera. In each, Mansfield explores the small yet transformative epiphanies in every day life and illuminates the unspoken, often misunderstood emotions common to us all.

In the wry "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," two sisters discover that freedom from their father isn t quite what they expected it to be. A lonely and naive older woman s contrived sense of self is painfully challenged in "Miss Brill." "At the Bay" considers the plight of a happily married young woman who struggles to find equality with her husband.

The Garden Party is an enduring work of literary craftsmanship from a marvelous modern artist."

Format: Paperback
Price: $35.00

ISBN: 9781877448324
Title: Ghosts in the Valley
Author: STEELE RICHARD


Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00

ISBN: 9780143567707
Title: Gorse Is Not People: New & Uncollected Stories
Author: FRAME JANET

This brand new collection of 28 short stories by Janet Frame spans the length of her career and contains some of the best she wrote. None of these stories has been published in a collection before, and more than half are published for the first time in GORSE IS NOT PEOPLE. The title story caused Frame a setback in 1954, when Charles Brasch rejected it for publication in Landfall and, along with others for one reason or other, deliberately remained unpublished during her lifetime. Previously published pieces have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, the NZ Listener, the New Zealand School Journal, Landfall and The New Yorker over the years, and one otherwise unpublished piece, 'The Gravy Boat', was read aloud by Frame for a radio broadcast in 1953. In these stories readers will recognise familiar themes, scenes, characters and locations from Frame's writing and life, and each offers a fresh fictional transformation that will captivate and absorb.

Format: Hardback
Price: $40.00

ISBN: 9780143010906
Title: His Best Stories
Author: IHIMAERA WITI

In this definitive collection by one of New Zealand's best-loved authors, Witi Ihimaera offers his personal choice of twenty-four stories from throughout his illustrious career. The pieces span more than thirty-five years - since his first collection, POUNAMU POUNAMU (1972), was published - and showcase the range, originality and humanity of this truly amazing writer.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780473329143
Title: History Write Now: South Auckland Writers at the Papakura Museum
Author: GEORGE JAMES (ED)

Contributions by Rosemary Nash, Kyung-Jung Kim, Kay Mills, E.H. Thomson, Bridget Bayly, David Howard, Lynne Fell, Laura Dunbar, Karen Forster, Loren-Crystal Pitt, Hanneke de Graaf, Dione Jones, Daryn Govender, Robyn Brown, Glenis Jones, Althea Barr, David E Horne, Doreen E.M. Lightfoot, Jocelyn Watkin

Ever wondered about the history of objects in a museum? If they could talk, what tales could they tell?

South Auckland writers were invited into the Papakura Museum to see if they could find out. These stories and poems of love, loss, triumph, new beginnings and changing times include actual events and memories as well as fiction. All are inspired by real taonga (treasures) in the museum.

Aotearoa New Zealand has been peopled by waves of migrants over the land's last millennium. Recurring themes in History Write Now are the fears, hopes and dreams of all migrants - some told from the perspective of the few but precious possessions brought with them. Papakura and South Auckland form the backdrop but not always - these 'flights of fancy' have sometimes taken off to land elsewhere.

The 18 writers in this publication, many of whom are new to writing, were selected from the 2015 History Write Now project. Their stories and poems were edited by author James George, who was the project's writing coach and mentor.

Format: Paperback
Price: $39.00

ISBN: 9781775502043
Title: Huia Short Stories #11: Contemporary Maori Fiction
Author: VARIOUS

Including stories by Toni Pivac, Aroha Bentson, Robert MacDonald, Aimee Tapping, K-T Harrison, Ann French, Anya Ngawhare, Lauren Aikman, Aaron Ure, Darryn Joseph, Zeb Nicklin, Vincent Olsen-Reeder, Andre Hetariki, Shilo Kino and Helen Waaka.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9781869694753
Title: Huia Short Stories #9
Author: VARIOUS

Here are the best short stories and novel extracts from the Pikihuia Awards for Maori Writers 2011, as judged by Keri Hulme, Katie Wolfe, Erima Henare and Reina Whaitiri. The book will contain the stories from the 18 finalists for Best Short Story written in English, the five finalists for the Best Short Story in Maori and the six finalists for the Best Novel Extract. For over ten years, the Maori Literature Trust and Huia Publishers have been responsible for this unique and increasingly popular biennial writing competition. The awards and their subsequent publications have become much anticipated as they bring more undiscovered gems to the attention of the New Zealand reading public. Past winners and finalists include James George, Briar Grace-Smith, Kelly Ana Morey and Paula Morris.

Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00

ISBN: 9780864737687
Title: I Got His Blood on Me
Author: PATCHETT LAWRENCE

A bloodied figure travels through time, a stepfather kicks a ball and curses a snack machine, a cranky ghost brakes a Kapiti train. From a reimagined history to a future where holograms walk the streets, these stories traverse time and genre to explore the frontiers that face the adventurous—now and in the past.
Lawrence Patchett was a winner of The Long and the Short of It short story competition in 2011. His work has also appeared in Sport, Dominion Post, Booknotes, Hue & Cry and Turbine. Currently completing a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University, he lives in Raumati.

Format: Paperback
Price: $35.00

ISBN: 9780994108821
Title: Itchy Hand
Author: MCDAVITT JEAN


Format: Paperback
Price: $35.00

ISBN: 630788642262
Title: Jaam 30
Author: JACKSON ANNA ED


Format: Paperback
Price: $15.00

ISBN: 9780986453724
Title: Jandal Prints on the Globe Capturing the Overseas Experience
Author: GILKISON JANE & PETHER RACHEL EDS

JANDAL PRINTS ON THE GLOBE captures the great overseas experience with short stories and photography by young New Zealanders travelling the world. So how about eating wind-dried Puffin, confabulating with rabid squirrels and riding the 'Wagon of Death' through rural Transylvania? Where do stubborn cattle ticks and unappreciative Flemish karaoke crowds fit in? This book combines 49 stories and 23 photographs in a compilation that will inspire all from the intrepid traveller to the armchair enthusiast.

Format: Paperback
Price: $40.00