EIGHT MONTHS AGO, you may have called a story with its heart in the cruel grip of an epidemic ‘apocalyptic’. Tomorrow evening, when you listen to the radio drama interpretation of CJ Langenhoven’s novella Mof en Sy Mense, you will recognise all the rawness of loss and the […]
MORE THAN AN exercise of escapism into the flaws and faux pas of privileged fictional characters, Craig Higginson’s most recent novel, The Book of Gifts, is a yarn about values and the fragility of young sensibilities. It’s a quick read because it is well crafted and the words […]
IN THIS AGE of social media, Wikipedia and any and every other kind of dumbing down and shallowing out of real thought, the presence of Ashraf Jamal’s anthology of art essays, published by Skira in 2017 raises a middle finger to lazy thinking, sloppy writing and weak academic […]
my mother, my madness: A book review by Gillian Rennie. SEVERAL THEMES SURFACE in Colleen Higgs’s chronicle of her mother’s last years. There are those any daughter might recognise (the bond of loyalty, the bondedness of reality) and there are those anyone who has witnessed a decline towards […]
BOOK REVIEW: ASLEEP AWAKE ASLEEP. BEFORE DIGITAL CAMERAS deluged us with thousands of images, there were slides: small squares of film mounted in a cardboard frame and loaded into a container, each slide in its own slot. As each image passed before the light of a projector, it […]
TRIBUTE TO JOHN W FREDERICKS BY MATTHEW VAN DER WALT. THE WRITER BEHIND the award-winning films Noem My Skollie and Shooting Bokkie, John W Fredericks, passed away peacefully after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, on 7 July 2019. He was 73. Having made peace with his own […]
BOOK REVIEW: A CHILDHOOD MADE UP. THE COMPLICATED HORROR of the genre of autobiography is three-fold. It’s about writing convincingly in the first person, which is never as easy as it sounds; it’s about the sense of permanence in a published piece of writing; as it is about […]
BOOK REVIEW: BETRAYAL BY JONATHAN ANCER. IT’S EASY TO judge someone proven to be in the wrong, someone unmasked and publicly shamed. It’s easy to tut-tut about someone’s malleability in the face of complicated lures. It’s also easy to voice judgemental opinions through the gauze of history, and […]
REVIEW: AFRIKAANS RADIO DRAMA: DIE SWERFJARE VAN POPPIE NONGENA. THE POTENT TREASURE of the complicated situation of standing still in a place where history is in the making, turning and swirling on itself and all that it may mean to future generations feels particularly prescient in this age […]
BOOK REVIEW: I WANT TO GO HOME FOREVER. WHAT IS A story? Knock on the scholarship of Carl Gustav Jung and you’ll discover that there are basically seven narrative plots in the world. Look at the ongoing repertoire of some children’s theatres and you may believe that there […]
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