Verhale uit die hartland.

Al die Karoostories wat Etienne van Heerden tot op hede geskryf het, word vir die eerste keer in een bundel versamel. Dit sluit onder andere in “Die gas in Rondawel Wilhelmina”, een van sy heel sterkste tekste.

Heerlike verhale wat Van Heerden se suiwer aanvoeling vir die woord en sy vermoë tot knap karakterisering en situasietekening demonstreer, almal geplaas binne ’n landskap wat hom besonder na aan die hart lê.

As much as this compendium of short stories is fantasia, the title came from a hallucinogenic experience where the author swam in a drinking well with hundreds of Salamanders, and the strange events that followed. The book is enriched with fifty tales from the in between, which range from stories of the Great War to Tiger hunting in India; from adventures in the Kalahari with The San to the Anglo Zulu War. They all have a strange hook in the swell of Roald Dahl.

It’s rare to find a compendium of short stories these days that captivate the mind with intrigue, as you go back for more and more. The stories leading up to the epitaph hook are truly creative and within the pages are clues to life and secrets revealed, the ultimate book to be beside your bed, as a story a night will hook like ‘Scheherazade and 1001 nights’

Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Foster’s The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in the United States. Both novels reflect the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the young country’s morality.

The stories, blogs and poetry in this anthology explores the stark divides that exist in our communities and our country, South Africa.

Written by a range of writers – from published authors to talented school students – these powerful narratives give voice to those who are poor and discriminated against, and are threaded through with hope and resistance.

‘n Versameling kortverhale deur die bekende skrywer J.M Gilfillan. Die hooftema is verhoudings en die wyse waarop mense reageer op die vreugde en verdriet wat deel is van hierdie lewe.

Meestal gaan dit nie oor groot en aardskuddende gebeurtenisse nie, maar die klein dinge van elke dag. Die broosheid van verhoudings.

Die bundel het ook ’n ligter kant. So is daar byvoorbeeld ’n spookstorie, daar is ’n bietjie erotiek, en heelwat oor die krag van woorde.

In these stories, seventeen writers from around the globe tell of dark doings in sunny places.

Join them in the Dominican Republic, the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, chic Mykonos, Seville at midnight, and on the morning beachfront of Ghana where a man has revenge on his mind. Follow an NGO worker kidnapped in Yemen, an engineer repairing a dam in turmoil-torn Ethopia, a foolish young Englishman hitchhiking across the Sahara. You will visit historic instabul and Mombasa and learn the secrets of family conflicts in Singapore, in Puerto Rico, in New Orleans.

The authors of these tales will convince you that evil under the sun makes for the most compelling, most entertaining crime fiction anywhere on earth.

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H. P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe.

This selection of stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Rats in the Walls’, through the grotesquely comic ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ and ‘The Hound’, to the extra-terrestrial terror of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, which fuses traditional supernaturalism with science fiction. Including the definitive corrected texts, this collection reveals the development of Lovecraft’s mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a hugely influential – and visionary – American writer.

Edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi.

A gripping collection of novellas, told from the perspectives of three different characters, these superb adventures are essential Skyward reading!

Sunreach
After a planet-destroying Delver suddenly appears in the sky of Detritus and vanishes just as suddenly, FM knows that the last free human society got lucky. Her Skyward Flight companion Spensa figured out how to draw this Delver away, but it won't be so easy next time. Humanity has to be prepared . . .

ReDawn
Alanik has recovered from the shock of answering a distress call and finding a planet of humans making a stand against the Superiority, only to be dismayed to discover they're considering a peace overture from their enemy. Worse, when she returns to her home planet of ReDawn, she find her own people falling into exactly the same trap. With her mentor captured, she turns to her new friends to help: can Alanik, FM, Jorgen and Rig coax an ancient technology into life in time to save both their planets from disaster?

Evershore
The government of Detritus is still in disarray following Superiority treachery, and no word has come from Spensa, on her mission deep in the Nowhere, leaving Alanik, Jorgen, FM and Rig to pick up the pieces. So when the Kitsen send word from the planet Evershore, saying they have some humans and wish to return them, they have to decie if the strange message can be trusted . . .

"New York Times" bestselling author Lee Child and the International Thriller Writers, Inc. present a collection of remarkable stories in "First Thrills." Showcasing many of the organization's bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before published, stories packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem.

*A cunning criminal thinks he can use a child to take the rap for his crimes.

*A hospital intern turned body-snatcher.

*A priest who comes face to face with his wife's murderer on death row.

*A confederate soldier comes home to his love, but changed by more than just the war....he comes back wrong.

*The discovery of a flying saucer in the deep sea brings one man to the brink of a massive revelation.

*A dying man's last request proves to his ex-wife that he's still rotten to the core.

*A clandestine operative finds himself caught in a wicked game of confusion . . . but who is calling the shots?

No matter what type of thriller you read, you'll find something here that will entertain you . . . and perhaps a new writer you'll cherish for years to come.

Amagama Enkululeko - Words For Freedom: Writing Life Under Apartheid is an anthology of short fiction, poetry, narrative journalism and extracts from novels and memoirs which frames local literature as a lens through which to engage with South Africa’s past. The collection was put together and edited by Equal Education.

With a foreword by Zakes Mda, and a mixture of famous and seemingly forgotten struggle writers, this anthology of poetry and prose opens a window onto the ways ordinary, everyday life was shaped by the forces of history.

The family – that small circle of beings where love should flourish – can be an arid and alienating territory where hatred and violence may ignite.

On the surface, Small Circle of Beings, the novella which gives its title to this collection, concerns a family living what would appear to be an idyllic life. When the couple’s only child falls ill, tension and strain begin to take their toll, and the hairline cracks and fissures in his parents’ relationship gradually widen and split open until a marriage that seemed solid and secure falls irretrievably apart. Galgut’s economy of style and his chilling gift for understatement and the macabre are nowhere more eloquently displayed than in this gripping story.

The same sensitive and atmospheric writing can also be seen in the shorter stories – ‘Lovers’, ‘Shadows’, ‘The Clay Ox’, and ‘Rick’.

'n Leeftyd Se Bekruip is ’n bundel verhale vol humor en avontuur. Dit gaan oor die te-voet-jag van kleinwild tot grootwild en strek oor verskillende lande en kontinente heen.

Dit gebeur nie aldag dat ‘n boer ‘n boek publiseer nie. Maar Dawie Strauss is nie ‘n gewone boer nie. Hy is ‘n boer én ‘n skrywer, ‘n jagter én ’n bewaarder.

‘n Boek wat op jou bedkassie of leunstoel, op jou see-handdoek of tydens jou vliegtuigrit op jou sal wag en sal sorg vir ‘n lekkerlees-avontuur. Sterre en kampvuur. Vriendskap en heimwee. Die bos róép…

'Perfectly crafted, intricate and haunting stories' from the bestselling author of THE READER. A mesmeric collection of stories about love. In his characteristically unsentimental, elegant and spare prose, Schlink unveils characters and relationships haunted by betrayal and guilt, in situations where self-examination is inescapable. FLIGHTS OF LOVE consists of seven stories, all of them weaving around the idea of love - why people are drawn to it and why some run away. Schlink shows us in turn love as desire, love as confusion, love as a quick affair, love as a drastic life-changing rebellion, love as a force of habit, love as self-betrayal. The cumulative effect is a book which uses effortlessly beguiling language to examine the universal human desire to find a lasting loving relationship, however thwarted that desire ultimately is.

A collection of poems written in honour of William Shakespeare, dressed up as a slight play with snippets of humour.

All in all... it's a slightly crooked affair

Connected by more than their exquisite prose, Nick Mulgrew’s new stories delve into a world of killer eagles, tattoo removal parlours, hardcore punk guitarists-cum-auditors, turtle sanctuaries, plane crashes, amateur pornographers and biltong-makers – a world concurrently too strange and too familiar for comfort. A collection of startling imagination and sympathy – set primarily in South Africa’s least fashionable cities and suburbs – these stories maintain a precarious balance between rich comedy and despair throughout their explorations of grief, spectacle, sex, nostalgia, and the lives of animals, both human and not. With audaciousness met by trademark spiritual undercurrents and poetic flourish, The First Law of Sadness is confirmation of Mulgrew’s status as one of South Africa’s best contemporary exponents of short fiction.

In his wry novella, Owen King conjures an eccentric North-Eastern American family whose personal strife mirrors the political turmoil of our time. George is the teenaged son of a single mother, and the only grandson of a family of union organisers in Maine. George's grandfather Henry, obsessed with the outcome of the 2000 election, has planted a giant billboard of homage to Al Gore in his front yard that he suspects has been defaced by the paperboy, now a sworn enemy. Meanwhile, George's mother is about to marry Dr Vic, who besides being possess by an almost royal obliviousness, may even have voted for George W Bush. George's efforts to aid his endearingly cranky grandfather and to undermine his mother's marriage reflect on a central question for our times: How will we fight? All together, or all alone? A heartwarming, funny and hugely inventive tale from a young writer set to become one of the most exciting talents on the Faber list.

Demons, witches, extra-sensory perception, possessed animals, and an ever-loving God. There is much that exists, or is claimed to exist, in the world today, that we are yet to understand. A perfect introduction into the inner workings of the weird mind of Graham Downs, this collection of flash fiction paranormal stories contains: The Thing in the Window, An Automatic Decision, Telepathic Link, The Witch of Wellington, and The Christmas Bird.

All have been newly edited and polished since publication on his website in 2014, and some with new endings. It also contains the never-before published story, Under the Sheets, about an old woman who believes she is being haunted by a strange ghost, living under her bed, and this special edition paperback includes the hit short story, Billy's Zombie!

Herman Lategan is ʼn flaneur van Seepunt. Wanneer hy voetslaan in die strate is hy ʼn toeris in die demi-monde, ʼn landskap van vlees en bloed. Hy swerf tussen bergies, dwergies, fopdossers, kerkmuise, nagblomme, laventelhane en ontheemdes. Hy lê die mens en homself tot op die been bloot.

Die karakters in sy stories, almal ongelooflik en eg, is almal van ons. Vroue wat swaar dra aan die verlies van blink verledes. Jong mans wat kaalbolyf dagga rook in Houtbaai, waar die “skyn van voorstedelike rustigheid” die res van ons flous, maar nie vir Herman nie, want hy sien onder die oppervlak “gluip iets wilds, soms sinister, maar ook opwindend.” Hy het ’n oog vir wat fout en uit plek en koddig en belaglik en mooi is, en vir wat snaaks en bisar is.

Lesers van Rapport het lank gevra vir ’n versameling van die beste rubrieke uit Herman se weeklikse Woorde wat wip. Hier ís hulle nou, oordeelkundig gekeur deur Amanda Botha. As pasella is daar ’n tweede afdeling: ʼn poespas van sy sielvolle, melancholiese stories. Danksy sy eiesoortige taalgevoel, verontrustende derde oog, aweregse blik op randeiers, en fyn humoristiese vergrootlas op die lewe, is elke vinjet ’n chiaroscuro van sonlig en donkermaan. Hierdie tydlose bundel kan jy stadig en sorgsaam soos ’n literêre smulpaap verorber. Lanklaas was daar sulke eensame beskrywings van die mens se oerverlange.

The inaugural Short Sharp Stories anthology, Bloody Satisfied, includes twenty-four top stories, and is introduced with a rollicking foreword by Deon Meyer.

It is a collection of thrilling twist-in-thetale stories that make good on the ‘Bloody Satisfied’ promise: slick and sexy stories that brim with danger and elements of the sinister; sophisticated stories that focus on the subtler crimes of everyday life; smart stories that invert expectations and linger in the mind.