Review quarterly archives now online and accessible to all

Review quarterly archives now online and accessible to all

Want to know what Ranginui Walker made of The People of Many Peaks, 1769-1869 edited by Claudia Orange back in 1991? What Vincent O’Sullivan had to say about Michael King’s biography of Janet Frame in 1999? Or Patrick Evans thought of Jones’s Mr Pip in 2007?

Now you can find out. A generous grant from the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board has allowed the journal’s publisher, Peppercorn Press, to develop a new website with a searchable archive. One of the grant’s conditions was that it be used for a project that would benefit the community at large – and that’s exactly what it will do.

Go to http://nzbooks.org.nz/ and click on Archive. From there, you can search by issue, as well as by author and reviewer, and many genre categories – short stories, memoir, history, science, music and so on. Anyone – subscriber or not, here or overseas – can already search many issues of the journal going back to number 1, Autumn 1991, and up to number 100, Summer 2012.

Just a small gap between 1995 and 1999 remains to be loaded. Only subscribers will be able to access later years’ issues, but everything else will be accessible to everyone.

The board of Peppercorn Press sees the online archive as consolidating New Zealand Books’ position as this country’s journal of record, and making a significant contribution to the country’s literary culture and heritage.

The Spring issue of New Zealand Books Pukepuka Aotearoa: A Quarterly Review is out from September 6.

Published with the support of Creative New Zealand, and our subscribers and readers, it’s the only periodical dedicated to reviewing this country’s books. It focuses almost entirely on New Zealand publications, and also carries opinion on any and all book-related topics, new poetry and occasional work in progress.

It treats books in depth at a time when many regular publications are either doing away with their books pages or cutting back their coverage of books. Published by Peppercorn Press Charitable Trust, it’s edited by Harry Ricketts and Jane Westaway. Subscriptions begin at $44 a year home-delivered.

ENDS

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