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Reviews
Greg Fleming, Kete Books ~ Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod recalls, in her editor’s introduction, carrying around the 1953 anthology of New Zealand short stories edited by Dan Davin that her father had given her. She praises the collection calling it “a treasure, a capsule of the Aotearoa New Zealand short story of the time” – and includes two writers from it, Frank Sargeson and Katherine Mansfield, in Lit: Stories from Home.
But her focus in Lit – aimed at teachers and students – is on looking “forward to find newer voices.” She believes a collection like this “tells us something of who we think we are at the time, or imagine ourselves to be — not always the same thing.”
And what we find is intriguing, a form in rude health, driven not by literary trends, but by issues of race, culture, displacement and identity. Yes, you’ll find established talents like Owen Marshall, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and David Hill here (Hill’s heartbreaking Hemingwayesque Free as a Bird is a treasure) but Lit’s most memorable moments give the stage to a new wave of writers; ones who allow us, in its editor’s words, “to glimpse Aotearoa … through the eyes of someone whose experience might not mirror our own.”
