Arts & Music
Culture Edmonds, sure to rise, again by Graham Reid
The reappearance of pop idol Sandy Edmonds is almost as peculiar as her disappearance.Art Best in show by Aaron Kreisler
The lobby of the Tower Gallery at Te Papa has been made over with faux columns and lush curtains for the Holbein to Hockney drawing exhibition from the Royal Collection.Dance Take one virgin by Francesca Horsley
Returning to a lighter side of life, Dawson’s A Million Kisses to My Skin, set to a Bach piano concerto, was rapturous and airy.Film Götterdammerung by Helene Wong
With the 60th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany just gone, Downfall – an account of Hitler’s last days – is a timely release.Music For those about to rock by Nick Bollinger
Sleater-Kinney’s music has always had a life-and-death quality that goes way beyond keeping the punters pogoing.Theatre Sex, pride & real estate by Jane Bowron
Restaging The Cherry Orchard in the 21st century.Theatre Seeing red by Harry Ricketts
At school, I once had the part of Gayev in a dramatised reading of The Cherry Orchard and got to pot imaginary billiard balls and mangle that great line: “People say I have wasted my substance on boiled sweets.”Theatre The kinks by Anna Chinn
Lulu is the breaking of an abstinence vow, and it is curiously invigorating.
Books
Out of the dark by David Larsen
I feel as if I’ve just been mugged. Nigel Cox’s new novel is the strangest, cleverest thing I’ve read since … since Nigel Cox’s last novel, actually.Spooked by Nicholas Reid
Before postmodernists came along and representation theory took over, critical battles about Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw were fought over one major issue.Being Pakeha now by Hugh Roberts
It’s no accident, one assumes, that the title of Brian Turner’s latest collection of poetry, Footfall, echoes the title of the grandaddy of New Zealand’s literary journals: Landfall.Denis’s menaces by David Hill
Michael Wall, Ray Prebble, Edmund Bohan, Michael Laws (and others, to whom I apologise deeply) have eased our crime fiction up from Not Too Good, past Not Too Bad, to Sometimes Damn Good.Visa … So vat? by Louise Wareham
First-time novelist Marina Lewycka is funny, very funny. The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, she is great at dialogue.
