In the wake of apartheid, South African culture conveys the sense of being lost in time and space. The Truth Commission provided an opportunity for South Africans to find their bearings in a nation changing at a bewildering pace. The Truth Commission also marked the beginning of a long process of remapping space, place and memory. In this title, Shane Graham investigates how post-apartheid theatre-makers and writers of fiction, poetry and memoir have taken this project forward, using their art to come to terms with South Africa's violent past and rapidly changing present.

Novelist and critic Colm Toibin explores the relationships of writers with their families and their work in the brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original "New Ways to Kill Your Mother."
Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind.
Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, "New Ways to Kill Your Mother "is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

Where are the dogs in southern African literature? The short answer is: everywhere, if you keep looking. Few texts centralise them, but they appear everywhere in the corners of people's lives: pets walking alongside, strays in the alleys, accompanying policemen, at the dog shows, outhunting, guarding gates. There are also the related canids- jackals, hyenas, wolves-making real and symbolic appearances. Dogs have always been with us, friends and foes in equal measure. This is the first collection of studies on dogs in southern African literatures. The essays range across many dogs' roles: as guides and guards, as victims and threats. They appear in thrillers and short stories. Their complex relations with colonialism and indigeneity are explored, in novels and poetry, in English as well as Shona and Afrikaans. Comparative perspectives are opened up in articles treating French and Russian parallels. This volume aims to start a serious conversation about, and acknowledgement of, the important place dogs have in our society.