THE FIRST TIME you read this book, instinctively, you know you must be very careful. To cite Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat: you might be looking at Van Gogh’s ear. This is the kind of metaphor that Lynn Joffe’s debut novel, The Gospel According to Wanda B. Lazarus presents. […]
NON-BINARY SOUTH AFRICAN performance artist Dean Hutton has stood on the outside looking in, for most of their life. While this may be a horribly lonely position for a child, it is one of supreme potency for an artist at the summit of their personal, political and artistic […]
THE DIRTY IDEOLOGY of apartheid was enforced on many levels. It saw the ignominious burial of grotesque secrets. Some more deeply than others. Indeed some of those secrets were never sufficiently exhumed for general access, not at the time, not during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and not […]
PICTURE THE SCENARIO. We’re in the Johannesburg suburb of Bertrams with all its broken dreams, building repair sites and street-based hawkers. It’s Septemberish in 2016. The air is hazy with pollen, but complicated with the excitement of a new entity. And a bunch of people, some of whom […]
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 […]
FILM REVIEW: TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM. WHAT IS THE holy fire that gives a documentary film, muscle? The thing that makes a doccie shimmer with the same kind of sexiness as a fictional thriller, bringing in audiences thirsty to learn and curious to understand, and rendering […]
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 […]
TRIBUTE TO HARRY KALMER, RESEARCHED BY KEZIAH GUNTER. TELLER OF THOUSANDS of the world’s hidden stories, Harry Kalmer was a man of immense skill, spirit and curiosity. He believed in the value of new experiences and no job was too humble for him to gain a grip on […]
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 […]
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