Books from Rosa Mira
Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes
By Michael Jackson
Internationally-acclaimed anthropologist and poet Michael Jackson hires a car and travels the length of his natal New Zealand, reflecting on the idea of origins. Visiting old haunts and old friends, he ponders the hold our histories have over us, and the enduring power of our first experiences in life.
Whether walking a deserted beach or chatting in a warm kitchen, Jackson is led to reflect on the ways we tell our life stories, write our national histories, assign value, allocate blame, and determine cause. His recurring theme is the tension between the forces that shape us and our freedom to take our destiny into our own hands.
Jackson addresses Māori invoking toi whenua in their claims for recognition and social justice; the search of adopted children for their birth parents; the notion of childhood as ‘the formative years’; and our preoccupation with genealogical, geographical or genetic backgrounds. Skillfully blending ethnography, history, philosophy, literature and personal reflection, he asks what it means to call a place or a time one’s own.
“Although our lives may not transcend our origins, we seem to need to believe that this is possible, as in the myth of Maui who sought to return to the womb and be born again.”
… exact, resonant and moving; beautifully wrought. Martin Edmond, Dark Night: Walking with McCahon.
US$11.00
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Slightly Peculiar Love Stories
By a superb cast of New Zealand and international authors
Whimsical, intense, pensive or amorous — we bring you a love story for every mood, each a little unorthodox, mysterious, or slightly peculiar.
Slightly Peculiar Love Stories paint a grand mandala of experience and circumstance: love appears and disappears; it aches and it dares; amuses and amazes; hurts, heals and begins again.
Love preoccupies writers from New Zealand, Israel, Hong Kong, Argentina and Athens, the UK and the US. Their 26 stories have been selected and edited by Penelope Todd.
Learn more about our slightly peculiar writers here and on the Rosa Mira Books blog.
Read excerpts now, from some of our wonderful writers.
US$5.00
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The Glass Harmonica: a sensualist’s tale
Dorothee E Kocks
What becomes of a woman who strives to live by her own vital principal, to find and embrace her own ‘electrical’ impulse?
Young Chjara Vallé, full of irrepressible music and sensuality, is exiled from her Corsican homeland, sold as a servant to an opium addict in Paris. Music paves the way for her to flee with Henry, her love, to New England. There the new freedoms and Puritan vigor vie for ascendancy. What will the Americans make of this throat-singing, harmonica-playing exotic who lives to make a virtue of pleasure?
US$7.00
Read excerpts now, from the first chapter and from chapter 7.
Reviews of The Glass Harmonica
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