On blogs and Twitter, in magazines and journals, at prizegivings and powhiri, New Zealanders are talking and writing about the world right now. We've been producing essays and articles, speeches and submissions, tweets and travelogues - nonfiction, in other words. This book collects some of New Zealand's best true stories from the past year or so together into an anthology. And tell you what, we are swimming in this great nonfiction. Essays that take us to new places (into Kim Dotcom's pool, under the floorboards in post-quake Christchurch, behind Hobbiton), introduce us to new people (a car-crash survivor, a Sherpa, a young woman on top of the world), ask new questions (how do we talk about rape culture? what does it mean to be `brown' in this country?) and bring us all the while a little closer to the true and the real. We've got family secrets and cricket matches, house auctions and the X-factor, tattoos and rescues and moments of truth. We've got Steve Braunias and Lara Strongman, Eleanor Catton and Ella Yelich-O'Connor. Tell you what - we've got real, live stories, written to last.

Author Biography

Susanna Andrew writes and thinks about books in Metro Magazine and at the New Zealand Book Council. Jolisa Gracewood is probably New Zealand's most prolific tweeter - which might all just be a way to hide from her PhD in comparative literature.