Albert Wendt is the leading writer and exponent of Pacific literature. His work is consistently different in style, politically challenging, and ranges across essays, plays, poems, stories and novels, two of which have been filmed. This book is the first full-length study of his work. There is an introduction to Pacific literature as a whole and Wendt's Samoan background. Chapters offer readings of all Wendt's major texts in chronological sequence, relating them to his essays, to literary movements of the time and to key motifs from Polynesian culture. There is an extensive bibliography of works by and about Wendt.

Originally published in 1973, this story of star-crossed lovers spotlights the complex nature of love, freedom, and racism in New Zealand. Samoan writer Albert Wendt's first novel, Sons for the Return Home, has long been out of print. Yet, readers continue to respond to the clarity of vision in this simple, powerful story of cross-cultural encounter.

What happens when an old man wakes up one morning and finds that everything around him now fills with revulsion? What happens when Faleasa Osovae, the highest ranking alii in the village of Maalaelua, feigns madness and throws away his responsibilities as a chief?

In a time of dynamism and contradiction in Pacific cultural production, a time of 'turning things over' and 'writing from the inside out, ' this far-reaching volume provides a comprehensive set of essays and interviews on the emergent literatures of the New Pacific. With its dynamic combination of important position papers, polemics, and decolonizing critiques by noted authors and of analysis by new and established post-colonial scholars, this volume exposes 'the maze and mix of literatures and cultural identities breaking down and building up across the Pacific Ocean.' This pioneering work will be the definitive resource for anyone researching or teaching Pacific literature and will be invaluable for bringing Pacific culture to readers outside the region

A collection of classic short stories from the award-winning author, Albert Wendt, acknowledged as one of the Pacific's major writers. Albert Wendt's short stories, providing a complex and profound understanding of people and the world, have been read and praised in New Zealand, the Pacific and internationally. This collection brings together his classic stories published in the Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree and the Birth and Death of the Miracle Man and Other Stories together with exciting, previously uncollected work. '. . . his stories have the tone of timeles, and very savvy, fables.' - New York Times 'A writer of international importance.' - Landfall

An epic spanning three generations, Leaves of the Banyan Tree tells the story of a family and community in Western Samoa, exploring on a grand scale such universal themes as greed, corruption, colonialism, exploitation, and revenge. Winner of the 1980 New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award, it is considered a classic work of Pacific literature.

This important anthology of contemporary Pacific writing in English is a successor to Lali, first published in 1980 and widely read and admired. Nuanua, like Lali, edited by distinguished Samoan writer Albert Wendt, shows the growing strength and confidence of Pacific writing in fiction and poetry since 1980. It includes work from new and well-established writers from nine Pacific communities: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Samoa. The legacy of colonialism and the problems of development and political change are among the themes explored.