Lasavia Publishing

06/11/2024

https://lasaviapublishing.com/love-in-the-age-of-unreason/

A new publication. Love in the Age of Unreason by Mike Johnson.

My first poetry book since Sketches (2023)
Different in spirit from the earlier volume, these poems arise from the topsy-turvy post pandemic world in which language itself battles for traction in an atmosphere of lies and deceit, and love searches for a place to lay its head.

Anything can happen and regularly does in the wide-angled lens of these spinning lines. The world passes through in its carnival masks. Despair and joy gyrate through ribbons of asphalt memories of glass divisions of mind. These poems give off brightly coloured sparks as they probe the fate of love in an age of unreason.

Love in the Age of Unreason by Mike Johnson Anything can happen and regularly does in the wide-angled lens of these spinning lines. The world passes through in its carnival masks. Despair and joy g…

06/11/2024

New Publication: Hecate by Leila Lees

Sharp, observant, gentle, metaphysical, heartbroken and healed. Here, the naturalist and the mystic go hand in hand. Leila Lees writes about nature with sensitivity and exactitude.

Hekate, the enigmatic Greek Goddess of magic, light, dark, the moon, ghosts, medicine, and crossroads stands at the boundary between the divine and the human world.

Hekete is experimental essay-poetry that leads the reader on a Journey into the natural world, and into the essence of minerals, plants and animals.

Hekate by Leila LeesSharp, observant, gentle, metaphysical, heartbroken and healed. Here, the naturalist and the mystic go hand in hand. Leila Lees writes about nature with sensitivity and exactitu…

29/10/2024

Portrait of a Lasavia writer. Lindsay Rabbitt.

Don't miss his new book Poems and Images. See https://lasaviapublishing.com/poems-images/

Lindsay Rabbitt was born in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand’s southernmost city, in 1950, and raised under the big skies of Central Otago, home district of his mother’s maternal people.

As a young man he trained as a hand and machine typographer and worked for newspapers and commercial printing houses. In the 1980s he purchased a Wellington typesetting and graphic design business. Renaming it Voice Press, he published poetry and short fiction. He reinvented himself as a journalist in the 1990s, working as a reporter/sub-editor for the Kapiti Observer, later writing (freelance) artist profiles, radio and book reviews for the NZ Listener. He occasionally writes book reviews for Landfall Review Online. He has lived on the Kapiti Coast for almost three decades and performs his poems with the song and spoken word troupe Waiata & the Word.

24/06/2024

'The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.'

Many of us writers involved with small or boutique publishers may think, when thinking about the Big Five publishers, that the grass is greener on that side of the street. I have certainly had these feelings from time to time, but have never been totally convinced. Now this document, the result of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into a proposed merger between Penguin and Simon & Schuster, which would've turned the Big Five into a Big Four gives us a startlingly honest picture of what is really happening.

That 50% of all books they publish sell less than 12 copies was a figure that blew me away. By that count, Lasavia writers are doing pretty darn well!

It seems that a small handful of celebrity and franchise writers carry these big publishers. If your name is Michelle Obama, you'll sell heaps of books even if badly written, and the publisher doesn't need to do any marketing!

Have faith in your voice and keep writing!

'The publishing houses may live to see another day, but I don’t think their model is long for this world. Unless you are a celebrity or franchise author, the publishing model won’t provide a whole lot more than a tiny advance and a dozen readers.'

Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

29/05/2024

Our current best seller is this debut novel by Waiheke writer Monika Killeen. This mother/daughter relationship story seems to have hit the spot with readers with strong online and direct sales. Congratulations Monika.

Lasavia Publishing (99% Press, TP Press & Beansprout Press) is dedicated to the publication & distri

16/04/2024

Our latest publication. Quite simply the best NZ book I've ever read on World War 2. Something more than a novel, it's a creative reconstruction of the era by a master of the language. We're very proud to have this on our lists.

Lasavia Publishing (99% Press, TP Press & Beansprout Press) is dedicated to the publication & distri

31/01/2024

Portrait of a Lasavia Writer: Monika Killeen.
Monika has published her first novel with us, An Inflammable Act of Kindness and it's making quite a spash with strong sales.

She was born in 1976 in a small town in Slovakia. She left in 1995 to see the world beyond her country’s newly opened borders, enticing like the forbidden room.

Discovering life as a young woman in London, she learned English while working as an au-pair. After twenty-six years in the UK and careers in law and psychotherapy, she migrated once again. She now lives on Waiheke Island off the north coast of New Zealand, with her husband, two children, and Rosie, the best dog in the world.

n her debut novel, Monika Killeen explores the mother-daughter relationship with clarity, honesty and wit. Spanning four generations of daughters, their lives shaped by the turmoil of twentieth century Eastern Europe, An Inflammable Act of Kindness follows Meli on her journey from the shadows of her small town to the glaring blaze of the Dream City. From a little girl with some uneasy questions for her grandma, to a young woman at boarding school, she bides her time before making an escape. The narrative weaves through times and places, piecing together the traumas, decisions and conflicts that make Meli who she is, fearlessly laying bare her inner world.

https://lasaviapublishing.com/an-inflammable-act-of-kindness/

23/01/2024

Portrait of a Lasavia Writer: Murray Edmond.
Murray Edmond displays his literary powers over several fields, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, dramaturgy, editing, teaching. Murray Edmond's work has had significant impact on NZ/Aotearoa arts. He writes with an acute eye for social contexts and character.

His first book with us Aucklanders is forged with craft and compassion. Lisa Samuels comments:
'Aucklanders is utterly human, showing the power of the city’s hidden histories and suppressed alternatives in lives that glow and break with absurdity and longing […] This is a wonderful book of human comedies that show how much hurt can hurtle through nervy humour. The language crackles with love and scorn, revelation and delusion and fate. Aucklanders is a tremendous collection of tales.'

https://lasaviapublishing.com/murray-edmond/

23/01/2024

I have finally come to the end of my huge study of Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour, hosted by Untold Dylan, 144 articles tracing Dylan's performances from 1987 – 2019. About two hundred and twenty thousand words with around 1500 Mp3 uploads, it took me four years to write and was a journey of discovery, covering the scope and nature of Dylan's musical odyssey.
We will be putting it out in book form, referencing the Mp3s on the Untold Dylan website. At first I thought the book was superfluous, but there's a growing understanding that people read longer pieces more comfortably on the page, and learn better than way too. Besides, I'm the generation that feels that words somehow have more solidity on the page than floating around in cyberspace, fb notwithstanding! The cloud's a bit too cloudy for me.
The link is for the last article of the series, and I cover three amazing versions of 'It's Not Dark Yet,' from 2019, when Dylan was seventy-eight. These three performances are an absolute blast, and were a great way to end the series.

The end of the Never Ending Tour: 2019 part 4: Virgil’s farewell: It’s not dark yet January 22, 2024 Tony Attwood Uncategorized This is Episode 144 of the Never Ending Tour series by Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet). An index to the full series appears here. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, we have the Roman ...