All Tomorrow's Poets is back for @nzpoetryday 2025! 💪 Friday 22nd August 6-7.30pm Upstairs at Time Out Curated by Time Out staff @uncle.rhi & @nate_carroll1, ATP will feature five incredible voices of Tāmaki Makaurau. Koha entry (which will go to the poets) and the coveted ATP zine will be available.

Are you ready for another Time Out backlist corner? Nate is back with @pipadam. ‘Sometimes a book is intrinsically tied to the place and time in which we first read it. I read ‘I’m Working on a Building’, Pip Adam’s debut novel, on the third day of a four night New Years festival. I was tenting in a beautiful valley in Golden Bay with no showers and a 24/7 techno backing track. In three days I’d probably had four hours of sleep collectively, all I could smell was my own sweat and everything I owned was damp, including the book, as it had rained on the first and second night and our tent kept leaking. Nonetheless, I picked it up and was completely transported- I finished it in one sitting. The book starts at the end- with a kiwi engineer working on a reproduction on the Burj Khalifa on the West coast- with each proceeding section jumping back in time. Its focus is structures, both literal and metaphorical, and the fractures that form within them. Adam’s writing is tight and controlled until the moment it isn’t, when it breaks and unspools in glorious and terrifying bursts of freedom.’

Jenna reviewed Maria Reva’s Endling on @radionewzealand’s Nine to Noon with Kathryn Ryan. This starts as an innocent narrative about snails, Ukraine’s romance tourism industry and a kidnapping. However, the Russian invasion explodes the novel’s structure; asking the question, how can one write and create art in a time of war? This novel is genuinely funny, it’s adventurous, it’s sad. It’s meta. It asks the big questions. What are art and love in a time of tragedy? How can we have hope? And perhaps Reva gives that in the form of a left swirling snail. Listen at the link in the bio. 🐌

Steve Braunias’ Polkinghorne is launched, with wonderful speeches from Michelle Hurley and C.K. Stead. Thank you to our friends at @allenandunwinnz 💕

Welcome to Time Out's backlist corner! We’re spotlighting some older books that hold special importance to our booksellers. Today, Nate chats about his favourite Ali Smith title. "The hardest decision for this one was which Ali Smith book to pick. All of her novels have a special place in my heart but in the end it had to be ‘How to be both’. It's the book that really showed me what writing could do, the potential it has to change our idea of what the world is, how it is structured and formed. There are two stories in this novel; a grieving teenage girl in modern London and a female painter in Renaissance Italy pretending to be male. The two timelines twine around one another, the past and present in constant flux. At its core, the novel is a rejection of the binaries we impose upon the world; of gender, fact/fiction, past/present, death/life. And the prose! If you locked me in a room for a decade and asked me to write just one perfect sentence I think Smith would still have me beat on any random page. A complete triumph. As fresh and unique now as it was on publication."