Strange Fruit is a courageous debut with a remarkable range in theme and tone, from the nostalgic to the comedic to the bawdy, and to the angry, the melancholic and the steadfast and comforting. It will delight, shock, anger, induce laughter, shock more, delight more. And make you blush. It's a full range. There are poems of brutally honest self-scrutiny - the heart of the collection being a series of poems on the ageing body, loss of love and infertility - and there are poems that capture landscapes with imagist skill and the botanist's detail.
Azila Talit Reisenberger is a Bible scholar, a rabbi, a mother, a wife, and a poet. In all these selves she grapples with translating her life from Hebrew to English and back again. Life in Translation is full of wry humour, longing, bitterness, sweetness, playfulness, and subversions of traditional meanings and texts - a delightful book that charms and surprises anew with each reading.
Now Following You is a clever, chilling and compelling read, which deals skilfully with relevant issues , most notably, the power social media gives to stalkers and others who intend harm. Jamie Burchell is a digital native , social media comes as naturally to her as breathing. She Instagrams, tweets and Facebooks her every move. Then a stalker starts using social media to track her movements. As his behaviour escalates, so does her fear. But her blog has never been more popular. The fans can,t get enough of reading about her stalker. She is closer than ever to achieving her dream of becoming a writer. Should she take herself offline, or should she refuse to be intimidated? Soon the stalker starts threatening the people she cares about. But now it,s too late for Jamie to go offline , he,s already following her in real life.
This is modern Lusaka, Zambia, where the line between magic and religion is blurred, the arcane and the mundane muddle and nothing is what it seems. Luse is a sharp street child combing the gang-ridden city in a desperate search for Doctor Georgia Shapiro who she hopes can offer her a way back into her once-bright past. The doctor is trying to unravel the mystery of a friend,s sudden death while attending to the AIDS crisis laying waste to the country around her. Meanwhile The Blood Of Christ Church and its enigmatic leader Priestess Selena Clark gain popularity with their murky promises of salvation and violent clandestine rituals. A small silver box links them in ways they cannot foretell. It will force Luse and Georgia to question who they trust, who they are and for whom they fight. Tanvi Bush's Witch girl is a crime thriller that juggles the past and the present effortlessly, blending AIDS activism, witchcraft, religious extremism and romance to create a well-paced narrative. Luse is so feisty, charming and resourceful that you'll miss her after you finish the book.
A page turning, gender and genre-bending novel set on the Cape Flats in Capetown, South Africa; a story of people who live in a place of violence which involves drugs, corrupt clergy, queerness, friendships - and how these survive in a society that is dysfunctional due to historical social problems; very much a novel of now, the 21st century. A book that will change the literary landscape of South Africa.This work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
This is Joan Metelerkamp's ninth book of poems. Her previous book, also published by Modjaji, Now the World Takes these Breaths (2014) was one of three on the short list for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many South African anthologies. As well as poems she has written reviews and essays about South African poetry, and read in most festivals in South Africa as well as in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Paris. She has been an associate of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, as a part-time teacher on the MA in creative writing at Rhodes University; before that, for five years, she edited New Coin poetry journal.
Three incarnations of women: a mother, a daughter and an old crone. A haunting of past, present and future selves. Drawing loosely on the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, this poetic text explores the process of individuation, the inevitability of a young girl's journey into the shadow and into the unknown, of the bonds that connect mothers and children to each other, of loss and the dense beautiful soaring life that we are all traveling through.
You wear silencesitting on the concrete floor of a librarya shroud like speechLanguage does not belong to you…An honest exploration of dislocation and (un)belonging in its forms: exile from language, exile from country, and exile from sanity. In her debut collection of poetry, Ndoro divides and intermingles national and personal history in an attempt to reach herself. Within its fragmented prose and lyrical poems, Agringanda is not only a celebrated capture of language but also of its intriguing subversion as it navigates meetings of class, gender, nationality and race.
Two women, one from the Netherlands and the other one from the Free State Goldfields, meet in a hospital hall in Bloemfontein. Fifty years later Hester tells the story of how life formed them as nurses, community workers, bakers, artists and life partners.In this memoir, she tells of the key moments in her life that led her to leave the strictures of her upbringing in order to find out who she was. Her decisions take her from the Free State to District Six and Venda, to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, to Heideveld and Hanover Park and, eventually, to McGregor. Her humble story tells of the spiritual isolation of all "refugees" who leave the irreversible values of their "home" (whether physical or ideological) and find new ways to create a life. It also describes the wonder of finding love and a partner along the way.
This is the fourth edition of the African Small Publishers' Catalogue. The catalogue is a showcase of the variety and extent of independent and small publishing in Africa.
Her poems are as subtle and intimately telling as the differences between the three languages in which she writes and battles to live and dream. These verses touch and tug at one another like the Afrikaans of her childhood, the German of her husband and the South African English of her homeland. They agree to differ in all sorts of nuanced ways.
The book contains listings of well over 40 different publishers. There are useful resources for writers and publishers. The back of the catalogue contains articles and short essays about the publishing scene in mostly, but not only Anglophone Africa. There are also items and innovations that are of interest to writers, booksellers, publishers, librarians, and all of those who are interested in the world of African publishing and book development.
This edition is a re-release of Xaba's first poetry collection (first publised in 2005) due to demand from readers and academics. A powerful, ground breaking work that placed Xaba firmly as an important voice the SA literary scene.WordsWhenever I take the pulseof my existence,feel the pinchof my persistenceagainst the grinding grainof my resistanceto the pounding punchof their insistence,words transmit to mea drumroll of deliverance.
In this second collection Messages from the Bees Robin Winckel-Mellish shows the same qualities as A Lioness at my Heels, but this time runs deeper, darker and stronger. She delves not only into the riotous colours of southern Africa: birds, bees and caracals, but also climate change, while different kinds of love are pinpointed. Her poems of loss and grief are candid and even sensuous, showing the beauty of simplicity in bleakness. Both delicate and reflective these poems honour the wild while retaining a deeply-felt sense of connection with all that is relevant to our lives.
Christine Coates is a poet and writer from Cape Town who spends many hours walking on the mountain or besides the sea. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has an interest in life-writing or memoir, and the recovery of personal history through public and private imagery. She translated her great-grandfather's Boer War journals and presented them in parallel text as a handmade, leather-bound book. She has undertaken the 800km pilgrimage across Spain, on the Camino de Compostela. Her stories and poems have been published in various literary journals: New Contrast, New Coin, Deep Water Literary Journal, scrutiny2, and the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry Review. Her poems were selected for the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry anthologies 2011 - 2014.
In this, her third collection of poetry, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers invokes images of past and present with hypnotic clarity, summoning the heart and heat of memory - painful and happy alike - with the distinct musicality and visceral punch she is known for. Some poems invite contemplation. Question and provoke. Others are elegiac, moments for reverence in a rich, diverse collection that both spans decades and pauses to revel in the intensity and beauty of a single moment. In liquid form that incorporates prose and poetry, de Villiers fearlessly confronts and disrupts, dipping into a wellspring of images that are euphoric and horrifying. At once prophetic and playful, ice cream headache in my bone is an exploration and celebration of language, a definitive collection that yields and responds, burns and soothes, all the while, calling to a longing for truth, and a tongue not tempered by oppression or pain.
I offer you my perspectives, my many mothers' teachings. I present both hopelessness and moments that excite, the taxi mgosi that makes me write.Johannesburg performance-poet Katleho Kano Shoro puts her stage presence into print with this metapoetic debut collection that captures the cadences of her fearless voice, her unassuming sense of humour, and her enthusiasm for an Afrocentric literary culture. Katleho reflects on creativity, on the writing, reading and performance of poetry, exploring the language that structures it, the forces that inspire it and the transformation that follows our experience of it. From there her words wander through personal relationships and politics, articulating ideas about masculinity, sexuality, blackness, colonialism and our connections to those we love. Crafted with both the spoken and written word in mind, Serurubele invites you not only to read poetry but to voice it, to taste the language as it flows from your tongue, to feel its rhythms and to hear its rhyme. Katleho has performed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Grahamstown, Swaziland and London, and has been involved in myriad African literary initiatives. Recordings of her readings can be found online.
'... the past was not yet done with here, I thought to myself; its problems drip-fed into the present, muddying it endlessly.'South Africa in a time of transition: a world of shifting boundaries and fluid identities, under siege from the relentless power of the past.In this evocative and finely crafted debut collection, De Villiers deftly probes the ambiguities of this changing country. From the older woman with her much younger lover, trapped in Johannesburg traffic during 'load shedding' - the new leveler - to the 'gap year' graduates seeking some kind of permanence abroad, each story manages to contain entire worlds. These are lives of unconscious longing; of individuals - often willingly - cast adrift from their history, animated here in poetic yet pared-down prose.
A dazzling collection from across the African continent and diaspora - here SHORT STORY DAY AFRICA has assembled the best nineteen stories from their 2013 competition. Food is at the centre of stories from authors emerging and established, blending the secular, the supernatural, the old and the new in a spectacular celebration of short fiction. Civil wars, evictions, vacations, feasts and romances - the stories we bring to our tables that bring us together and tear us apart.
Journeys & arrivals in strange & magical places - a kaleidoscopic collection of stories by Africa's younger writers. Follow the Road is a collection of stories pushing against the grain of right vs wrong. It is an anthology of unique perspectives, ideas and dreams.
Life wasn't always this hard for fourteen-year-old Mvelo, who lives with her mother, Zola in the shacks on the margins of Mkhumbane township. There were good times when they lived with Sipho, Zola's lawyer boyfriend. But when the beautiful and mysterious Nonceba Hlathi arrives, Zola has to make a choice. She also has her pride. Now their social grants have been discontinued: the one for Mvelo being underage reared by a 31-year-old single mother, and the other for Zola because of her status. And there is also an elephant growing in their shack as the terrible thing that happened that night in the revival tent remains unspoken. In her second novel, Futhi Ntshingila once again introduces us to a cast of strong women who have little, but are determined to shape their own destinies.
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