A South African pastor and a young teacher from Cape Town battle over the fate of an eccentric elderly widow. The play won the 1988 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

In 1957 emigreer die negejarige Henk van Woerden vanaf Nederland met sy gesin na Kaapstad – leertas in die hand, mussie oor die ore, serp om die nek, glasoog in die oogkas. Eers veertig jaar later ontdek hy wat die rede was vir hierdie vertrek na Suid-Afrika: Sy pa was ’n kollaborateur in die Tweede Wêreldoorlog. Die emigrasie is die begin van ’n lewe as buitestaander en vorm later die goue draad in sy skilderye en literêre werk.

Koning Eenoog is ’n boeiende biografie van die ewig soekende emigrant Henk van Woerden (1947–2005), ’n skrywer wat nie net ’n bekroonde oeuvre agtergelaat het nie (Een mond vol glas – Alan Paton Award en die Frans Kellendonk-prys, Ultramarijn – Gouden Uil en Inktaap) maar ook die Nederlandse literatuur oor Suid-Afrika verander het.

Amanda Gorman's powerful and historic poem 'The Hill We Climb,' read at President Joe Biden's inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition.

On 20 January 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Her poem "The Hill We Climb" can now be cherished in this special gift edition. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates our promise and affirms the power of poetry.

Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle.

In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, the author finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods.

In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.

The first ever memoirs from the Number One global bestselling adventure author.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

Always candid, sometimes hilarious, and never less than thrillingly entertaining, On Leopard Rock is testament to a writer whose life is as rich and eventful as his novels are compellingly unputdownable.

The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa’s leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume.

This compilation features critical essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J.M. Coetzee, as well as writings on gender politics, race, identity, visual art, sexuality and a wide range of other cultural and political topics. Also included are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb.

In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insight on her nation’s history, policies, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and diversity and pluralism are the declared enemies of right-wing populist movements, her essays speak powerfully to a wide range of international issues.

A Manifesto For Social Change is the third of a three-volume series that started seven years ago investigating the causes of our country’s – and the continent’s – development obstacles.

Architects of Poverty: Why African Capitalism Needs Changing (2009) set out to explain what role African elites played in creating and promoting their fellow Africans’ misery. Advocates for Change: How to Overcome Africa’s Challenges (2011) set out to show that there were short-term to medium-term solutions to many of Africa’s and South Africa’s problems, from agriculture to healthcare, if only the powers that be would take note. And now, more than 20 years after the advent of democracy, we have A Manifesto For Social Change: How To Save South Africa, the conclusion in the ‘trilogy’.

This book started its life as Gridlocked, but through the process of research undertaken by Moeletsi and Nobantu it has evolved into a different project, a manifesto that identifies some of South Africa’s key problems and what is required to change the country’s downward trajectory.

Nuruddin Farah is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated voices in contemporary world literature. Michel Foucault is revered as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, with his discursive legacy providing inspiration for scholars working in a range of interdisciplinary fields. The Disorder of Things offers a reading of the Somali novelist through the prism of the French philosopher. The book argues that the preoccupations that have remained central throughout Farah's forty year career, including political autocracy, female infibulation, border conflicts, international aid and development, civil war, transnational migration and the Horn of Africa's place in a so-called 'axis of evil', can be mapped onto some key concerns in Foucault's writing most notably Foucault's theoretical turn from 'disciplinary' to 'biopolitical' power. In both the colonial past and the postcolonial present, Somalia is typically represented as an incubator of disorder: whether in relation to internecine conflict, international terrorism or contemporary piracy. Through his work, both fictional and non-fictional, Farah strives to present alternative stories to an expanding global readership. The Disorder of Things analyses the politics and poetics that underpin this literary project, beginning with Farah's first fictional cycle, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979-1983), and ending with his Past Imperfect trilogy (2004-2011). Farah's writing calls for a more refined, substantial reading of our current geo-political situation. As such, it both warrants and compels the kind of critical engagement foregrounded throughout The Disorder of Things. This book will appeal to students, academics and general readers with an interest in the interdisciplinary study of literature. Its engagement with theorists, drawn from postcolonial, feminist and development studies, set against the backdrop of a host of philosophical and sociological discourses, shows how such intellectual cross-fertilisation can enliven a single-author study.

Ter viering van Dolf van Niekerk se negentigste verjaarsdag verskyn hier ’n versameling filosofiese, bepeinsende en besinnende essays uit die pen van een van Afrikaans se meesterskrywers.

Vanaf sy vroegste gewaarwordinge tot sy kennismaking met groot filosowe soos Nietzsche, Kant en Hegel op universiteit en in sy daaglikse handel en wandel daarna: altyd maar bly die bewustheid van ’n onsigbare “iets” by hierdie aristokratiese gees – en ’n soeke na ’n beter verstaan van dít wat “die sterretyd en die menstyd aan mekaar verbind”.

In 48 essays wat die biografiese tydperk tussen ongeveer sy vyfde en twintigste lewensjaar dek, skryf ’n deurleefde, wyse Van Niekerk oor sy vroegste herinnerings aan sy geboortedorp, sy gesin en sy helderste herinnerings aan die plekke en mense wat hom gevorm het tot die mens wat hy geword het. Want, soos wat hy in die verhaal “Die skinkbord” skryf: Jy kan net wees wie jy is, en jy is wat jy word.

I Write What I Like features the writing of the famous activist and Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. Before his untimely death in detention at age 30, he was instrumental in uniting Black Africans in the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa.

This 40th anniversary edition includes a foreword by Njabulo S. Ndebele, personal reflections on Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, as well as Biko’s first known published piece of writing. In addition, it features all the material of the original Picador Africa edition: a collection of Biko’s columns entitled I Write What I Like published in the journal of the South Africa Student Organisation under the pseudonym of ‘Frank Talk’; other journal articles, interviews and letters written by Steve Biko at the time; an Introduction by Nkosinathi Biko; a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and a moving memoir by Father Aelred Stubbs, which pays tribute to the courage and power of this young leader, who was to become one of Africa’s heroes.

Part literary history, part feminist historiography And Wrote My Story Anyway critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers.

Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction critically interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society.

This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoe Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christianse, Kagiso Lesego Molope and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects.

Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

"Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles."

Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his beautifully surreal worlds will be fascinated by this highly personal look at the craft of writing.

In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.

In Gode van Papier poog die digter om gestalte te gee aan die moderne mens se gode: gode (ook buite die tradisionele sin van die woord) met voete van klei wat op hul plek gesit en gehou word.

Hoewel die woord "gode" dikwels in die bundel gebruik word, dui dit baie keer nie op gode in die tradisionele sin van die woord nie.

Allerlei dinge, tot die gedigte self, word gode in hierdie bundel.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Life of Pi is a contemporary novel about one boy's story of endurance after a disaster at sea leaves him the sole survivor in a lifeboat for 227 days with a fierce Bengal tiger. The story charts the life and death experiences of the protagonist, Pi, as he is forced to draw on his spiritual and mental strengths to survive every part of his adventure. The layers of vivid story-telling reveal the many complexities of Pi's extraordinary journey.

Features:

- Includes introductory notes about the author, and background information about the novel, themes and characters

- Annotations in the margins highlight literary concepts to guide learners' thinking as the novel progresses

- Footnotes throughout the novel provides learners with explanations of new words and key concepts

- Short questions, contextual questions and essay questions address all cognitive levels, prepare learners for their exams and promote critical thinking

- Includes answers to all questions

This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa’s foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr’s path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world.

This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South’s leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities. Isabel Hofmeyr’s scholarship spans more than four decades, and its sustained and long-term influence on her discipline and beyond is formidable.

While much of the history of print cultures has been written primarily from the North, Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the leading thinkers producing new knowledge in this area from Africa, the Indian Ocean world and the global South. Her major contribution encompasses the history of the book as well as shorter textual forms and abridged iterations of canonical works such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. She has done pioneering research on the ways in which such printed matter moves across the globe, focusing on intra-African trajectories and circulations as well as movements across land and sea, port and shore.

The essays gathered here are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. Via their engagement with Hofmeyr’s path-breaking work, the essays in turn elaborate and contribute to studies of print culture as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating their findings from the point of view of global South historical contexts and textual practices.

These essays bring to life many facets of Magona’s personal history, her deepest convictions, love for her country and belief in her ability to activate change. They are a meaningful supplement to her fictional works, while offering insightful responses to the conditions that inspired them.

Sindiwe Magona is a celebrated South African writer, storyteller and motivational speaker known mainly for her autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, poetry and children’s books. I Write the Yawning Void is a collection of essays that highlight her engagement with writing that span the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid period and addresses themes such as HIV/Aids, language and culture, home and belonging.

Magona worked as a teacher, domestic worker and spent two decades working for the United Nations in the United States of America. She has received many awards for her fearless writing ‘truth to power’. Her written work is often informed by her lived experience of being a black woman resisting subjugation and poverty.

These essays bring to life many facets of Magona’s personal history as well as her deepest convictions, her love for her country and despair at the problems that continue to plague it, and her belief in her ability to activate change. They demonstrate Magona’s engaging storytelling and mastery of the essay form which serve as meaningful supplements to her fictional works, while simultaneously offering insightful responses to the conditions that inspired them.

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Shakespeare is a fascinating collection of surprising revelations, quirky characters and other fascinating pieces of trivia from the world of the great English bard. From the stories behind his well-known plays and poems, through the actors and theatres that have entertained his works, to his legacy in popular culture and beyond, an intriguing and unusual history of his life and times is revealed. Drawing back the curtains on this iconic English character, there is something here for every enthusiast to relish. This authoritative and absorbing book is published to coincide with the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's death on 23rd April 2016.

Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji is variously read as a work of feminist protest, the world's first psychological novel and even as a post-modern masterpiece. Commonly seen as Japan's greatest literary work, its literary, cultural, and historical significance has been thoroughly acknowledged. As a work focused on the complexities of Japanese court life in the Heian period, however, the The Tale of Genji has never before been the subject of philosophical investigation. The essays in this volume address this oversight, arguing that the work contains much that lends itself to philosophical analysis. The authors of this volume demonstrate that The Tale of Genji confronts universal themes such as the nature and exercise of political power, freedom, individual autonomy and agency, renunciation, gender, and self-expression; it raises deep concerns about aesthetics and the role of art, causality, the relation of man to nature, memory, and death itself. Although Murasaki Shikibu may not express these themes in the text as explicitly philosophical problems, the complex psychological tensions she describes and her observations about human conduct reveal an underlying framework of philosophical assumptions about the world of the novel that have implications for how we understand these concerns beyond the world of Genji. Each essay in this collection reveals a part of this framework, situating individual themes within larger philosophical and historical contexts. In doing so, the essays both challenge prevailing views of the novel and each other, offering a range of philosophical interpretations of the text and emphasizing the The Tale of Genji's place as a masterful work of literature with broad philosophical significance.

Providing intriguing insights for students, film buffs, and readers of various genres of fiction, this fascinating book delves into the psychology of 100 well-known fictional characters. Our favorite fictional characters from books and movies often display an impressive and wide range of psychological attributes, both positive and negative. We admire their resilience, courage, humanity, or justice, and we are intrigued by other characters who show signs of personality disorders and mental illness-psychopathy, narcissism, antisocial personality, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among many other conditions. This book examines the psychological attributes and motivations of 100 fascinating characters that include examples of both accurate and misleading depictions of psychological traits and conditions, enabling readers to distinguish realistic from inaccurate depictions of human behavior. An introductory section provides a background of the interplay between psychology and fiction and is followed by psychological profiles of 100 fictional characters from classic and popular literature, film, and television. Each profile summarizes the plot, describes the character's dominant psychological traits or mental conditions, and analyzes the accuracy of such depictions. Additional material includes author profiles, a glossary of psychological and literary terms, a list of sources, and recommended readings. Provides an engaging and entertaining way to learn about both positive psychology and mental health issues through the behavior of interesting and often familiar characters, leading to a better understanding of human behavior Helps readers distinguish realistic depictions of psychological disorders from inaccurate ones, providing a basis for avoiding negative mental health stereotypes and stigma associated with mental illness Covers a wide range of behaviors and psychological disorders arranged in a convenient format, making it easy to find and learn about particular topics that can be read in or out of order

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In this book, Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the wars over memory surrounding Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife in which the ruling family waged war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord. In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg elucidates the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire.

An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot Diaz, Hector Tobar, Cristina Garcia, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form-that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.

Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.

Wonder Woman, Amazon Princess; Asterix, indefatigable Gaul; Ozymandias, like Alexander looking for new worlds to conquer. Comics use classical sources, narrative patterns, and references to enrich their imaginative worlds and deepen the stories they present. Son of Classics and Comics explores that rich interaction. This volume presents thirteen original studies of representations of the ancient world in the medium of comics. Building on the foundation established by their groundbreaking Classics and Comics (OUP, 2011), Kovacs and Marshall have gathered a wide range of studies with a new, global perspective. Chapters are helpfully grouped to facilitate classroom use, with sections on receptions of Homer, on manga, on Asterix, and on the sense of a 'classic' in the modern world. All Greek and Latin are translated. Lavishly illustrated, the volume widens the range of available studies on the reception of the Greek and Roman worlds in comics significantly, and deepens our understanding of comics as a literary medium. Son of Classics and Comics will appeal to students and scholars of classical reception as well as comics fans.