The VUP Home Reader 2020

The VUP Home Reader (ebook) is everything we’re working on at the moment—extracts of books which were published in February and March, books which are in the warehouse or on the water, final proofs and uncorrected proofs, manuscripts and work-in-progress—stretching into 2021. We offer it as company, as entertainment, as a promise. Download it from the MeBooks link above.

Stay safe and well.
Stay home and read!

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou.

Fergus Barrowman, Publisher
Craig Gamble, Publishing Manager
Kyleigh Hodgson, Editor
Kirsten McDougall, Publicity Director
Jasmine Sargent, Editor
Ashleigh Young, Editor

'Victoria University Press has taken an active response to the Great Plague and its various assorted prohibitions of our freedom to go for a walk and open the door of a bookstore and buy a book, and has exercised skill and initiative to bring out that precious thing everyone craves: something new to read. . . . The VUP Home Reader 2020 has got a lot of reading in it. It’s got economics by Brian Easton, it’s got a novel in progress by the best-selling Catherine Chidgey, it’s got a beautiful memoir of a hippie commune, it’s got two knock-out short stories, it’s got an incredible essay by that singularly incredible essayist, Danyl McLauchlan. It’s got over 40 authors, one dead (James K Baxter).' —Steve Braunias, Newsroom 

Cover: Tara Black

Contents

Eamonn Marra, Home
Freya Daly Sadgrove, Heron
Oscar Upperton, Dutch Instruction
Alison Douglass, from Assessment of Mental Capacity
Madison Hamill, Speculative Fiction
Mikaela Nyman, from Sado
Breton Dukes, The Swimmers
Michele Amas, Home town
Natalie Morrison, from Pins
Ian Wedde, from The Reed Warbler
Brian Easton, from Not in Narrow Seas
Hinemoana Baker, How to Survive on a Plinth
Pip Adam, from Nothing to See
James Brown, Metro
Rata Gordon, Vagator
Craig Gamble, The Rule of Twelfths
David Coventry, from Dance Prone
Miro Bilbrough, from In the Time of the Manaroans
Kate Camp, How to Be Happy Though Human
Chloe Lane, from The Swimmers
Airini Beautrais, Sin City
Phil Lester, from Healthy Bee, Sick Bee
Ingrid Horrocks, Canyon Country: The Elk
Bernadette Hall, from Fancy Dancing
Tusiata Avia, Samoan funeral with Aunty
Catherine Chidgey, from Remote Sympathy
Geoff Cochrane, Chosen
Bill Manhire, Wow
Tara Black, from This Is Not a Pipe
James K. Baxter, The Fleece
John Newton, from Escape Path Lighting
Tina Makereti, Tea
Ruby Solly, Arrival
Rebecca K. Reilly, from Vines
Ash Davida Jane, conversation / conservation
Patrick Evans, from Bluffworld
Susanna Gendall, from The Disinvent Movement
Danyl McLauchlan, The Hunger and the Rain
Vincent O’Sullivan, Once
Kirsten McDougall, from She’s a Killer
Sue Orr, from Loop Station
Elizabeth Knox, Faulty Valve