Essay

Featured
Woman holding smiling sign on her face outside smile street

Rules for smiling at strangers

You'll know me next time, writes Linda Burgess.

Read on.


Contributing writer
-

RELATED:

When your mind's eye is firmly shut

New

An introvert’s ultimate birthday party: 24 hours alone in Invercargill

December 9, 2019: An intensive care doctor remembers Whakaari/White Island

How to be brave in the face of, you know, everything

A tale of two plagues

'I wrote The Pōrangi Boy for kids like me': Shilo Kino on her debut novel

How not to get lost in your story

A gold tickle of toi-toi

Aotearoa is not Middle-earth

The brick path: from war-zone aid worker to Christchurch crime novelist

Meros is dead. Long live Murdoch

As a doctor, I know better than most that climate change is a healthcare issue

Healthcare organisations need to realise that climate change and wellbeing are intertwined – and that what's good for the environment is always good for health.


Guest writer
-

A lesbian author surveys the lesfic landscape and finds it wanting

Lil O'Brien grew up having to read between the lines to find girls like her. Girls who liked girls, that is.


Guest writer
-

The writer and the artist

Novelist Chloe Lane talks to artist Nicola Farquhar about guts and hats, and her fondness for ruining things.


Guest writer
-

The perils of loneliness in the time of Covid-19

Physical isolation may be the way to eliminate Covid-19, but it could come at a high cost to mental health.


Guest writer
-

Essay Archive

Little things lost

A new essay by Linda Burgess.


Contributing writer
-

Baxter, redux: Second thoughts on Jacquie Sturm and her lousy husband

Two scholars respond to our recent series on James K Baxter, and his wife, Jacquie Sturm.


Guest writer
-

A white man’s fantasy – and sad reality – of living alone on a Cook Islands atoll

John Summers is inspired by a dreamer who ended up living as a kind of Robinson Crusoe on a Cook Islands atoll 'where there truly was no sound beyond the waves, the birds and whatever noise you made yourself'.


Guest writer
-

Giving voice: making theatre with actors who have intellectual disabilities

A new book by Tony McCaffrey deals with stage performances by people who have intellectual disabilities.


Guest writer
-

Baxter Week: My Nana, Jacquie Sturm

An essay by James K Baxter's great-grandson Jack McDonald about his Nana, Baxter's wife, the author and Māori leader Jacqui Sturm.


Guest writer
-

Baxter Week: CK Stead remembers shaggy, ridiculous, brilliant James K Baxter

All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books revisits the great poet James K Baxter, on the occasion of a new book of letters. Today: CK Stead remembers Baxter, in this extract taken from his memoir in progress, South-East of Everywhere.


Guest writer
-

Baxter Week: James K Baxter, 1969

All week this week we revisit the great poet James K Baxter on the occasion of a new book of letters. Today: a selection of the letters written in 1969.


Guest writer
-

Waitangi Week: the Queen is dead, or may as well be

Morgan Godfery wonders exactly what the point is of New Zealand bowing to a monarch "of a rain-soaked island off the north-western coast of the European mainland".


Contributing writer
-

Fiona Kidman gets in the ring with Lloyd Jones for the heavyweight title fight: the 2019 Ockham longlist

The full list, with mild critique, of the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlist.


⚖️
-

We cross live to an extraordinary bookstore in Upper Hutt

Cat Connor of the Writers Plot Bookshop in Upper Hutt backgrounds the birth and development of New Zealand's only bookstore devoted exclusively to Kiwi authors.


Guest writer
-

In defence of Amazon by a Kiwi erotic romance author

An essay in praise of Amazon by Kirsty Wright, a Southland erotic romance author who is 'killing it' thanks to sales generated by the online empire.


Guest writer
-

Book of the Week: Catherine Robertson’s hilarious new novel

Catherine Robertson's latest novel What You Wish For has raced to the top of the best-seller charts – but what she really, really wants is to win a prize for being funny.


Guest writer
-