Category: Review

Granny’s Christmas wish: Jesus, husband and babies

IF YOU TAKE a step back from what your granny might want for your life, and what you may want for it, it’s merely a question of timing. Chinara, in episode 16 of The End of the Line, a series of British fictional monologues on podcast, skirts this […]

How to set paper flowers on fire

IT ISN’T EVERY day that you get to see a film which has the gravitas of the bible, the sinister undertones and dark wit of Quentin Tarantino’s work and the timelessness and devastating subtlety of a classic of the ilk of work by Ernest Hemingway. In Jane Campion’s […]

Who’s your Marmee?

WHAT IS IT with the broad public – strangers on the bus – when they encounter something out of their experiences and need to poke at it? Maxine, in episode 15 of The End of the Line, a series of British fictional monologues on podcast, ponders this issue, […]

Why you should fear the media

FROM THE SINISTER complexity of its cover, to its end pages, Anton Harber’s 2020 publication So, for the Record is a vital essay on the current state of journalism in South Africa. And it’s not a pretty picture. This publication should be present on the bookshelves of anyone […]

Portrait of Fietas, with heart

SOMETIMES WHEN YOU think your dream opportunity has finally presented itself, you’re rudely given to understand that the universe has a whole different narrative plotted for you. The sequel to Craig Freimond’s 2012 film Material, called New Material, released nationally on 26 November. It will have you reaching […]

No place like home

IT IS NOT every day that a story has the potency to leap off the page and into the rhythms of your heartbeat, regardless of how it has been written or presented. Estelle Neethling has experience as a writer of profiles, not books. But when Adolphine Misekabu crossed […]

Look, deeper

SHE’S LOOKING AT you peripherally, her face fierce and focused in profile, a pencil in her hand. She’s a woman who has waited her turn in a schoolroom in Kampala, Uganda. For generations. But she’s more than just a reflection of education and abandonment, of culture and sexism. […]