The Near North is a vivid account of life in Johannesburg in times of crisis.

From the stony ridges of Langermann Kop in Kensington to the tree-lined avenues of Houghton, we follow the writer through the city's streets, meeting its ghosts and journeying through time and (often circumscribed) space, finding meaning in the everyday and incidental.

At once an echo of Ivan Vladislavić’s award-winning Portrait with Keys and an original work of intense acuity and quiet power, The Near North is both intimate and expansive, ranging from small domestic dramas to great public spectacles.

Wryly playful at times, fiercely serious at others, it is certain to move and delight all who accompany the writer through its pages.

A private-eye convention and a tussle over a Pierneef. A young man's unsettling experience in the American South and a tragedy off the coast of Mauritius. A bizarre night of industrial theatre and a translator at a loss for words.

These are but a few of the fictions in 101 Detectives, a new collection of short stories by Ivan Vladislavić, one of South Africa's most celebrated authors.

A collection of short stories launched his career as a writer. Twenty-six years and a whole oeuvre later, 101 Detectives showcases Vladislavić's virtuosity as he bends and recasts this literary form in spectacular fashion.

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He begins to collect cuttings about his hero from the newspapers, an obsession that grows into a ragged archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks both insist on and obscure a book about his boyhood. He turns to his brother Branko, a sound editor, for help with recovering their shared past. But can a story ever belong equally to two people? Is this a brotherly collaboration or a battle for supremacy?

This is an intricate puzzle of a book by a writer of lyrical power and formal inventiveness. Against a spectacular backdrop, the heyday of the greatest showman of them all, Vladislavić unfolds a small, fragmentary story of family life and the limits of language. Meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

‘The boundaries of Johannesburg are drifting away, sliding over pristine ridges and valleys, lodging in tenuous places, slipping again. At its edges, where the city fades momentarily into the veld, unimaginable new atmospheres evolve …’ This half-made world beside the freeways, where Tuscan townhouses are jostled together with township matchboxes and shanties, is the setting for Ivan Vladislavic's book. In a quartet of interlinked fictions, he unfolds the stories of four men – a statistician employed on the national census, an engineer out on the town with his council connections, an artist with an interest in genocide and curios, and a contractor who puts up billboards on building sites. As they try to make sense of a changed world, themes seldom explored in South African fiction come vividly to life. Ranging effortlessly across distance and time, Vladislavic deftly explodes our comfortable views and shows us what lies behind the seductive surfaces.

It is 1993, and Aubrey Tearle's world is shutting down. He has recently retired from a lifetime of proofreading telephone directories. His favourite haunt in Hillbrow, the Cafe Europa, is about to close its doors; the familiar old South Africa is already gone. Standards, he grumbles, are in decline, so bad-tempered, conservative Tearle embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow citizens. The results are disastrous, hilarious and poignant.

What happens when a story goes missing or remains unrecorded? When a writer carelessly gives his plot away during a conversation or dies before writing the ending? These stories end up in the Loss library, where the books that have never been written are kept. In this title, one of South Africa's finest writers examines eleven of his own lost fictions, how the ideas arose and why he abandoned them. But this reflection on the art of writing is not a lament for unfinished work. Rather The loss library is a meditation on creativity, mortality and the allure of the incomplete.

Portrait with keys consists of 138 numbered short texts, each addressing life in Johannesburg. The time frame stretches from recollections of the late 1970s to the immediate present. The protagonist is, in most instances, the author himself, although there are dozens of other characters with whom he shares encounters and interactions.

A senior photographer introduces a young man to the intricacies of photography. 'If,' he says, 'I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn't do it in a novel, let alone a photograph.'

The novel follows the young man's broken path, as he goes overseas, finds a career, and then comes back to a changed Johannesburg. In the process, the book develops an ever-widening perspective not only on change in the country, but also on questions to do with seeing and being seen.

It brings into sharp focus South Africa's recent history and the difficulty of depicting it.

Two sought-after collections of short stories by Ivan Vladislavic are brought together and made available again in this new volume. Vladislavic’s mastery of understatement and brevity is brilliantly demonstrated in these stories from Missing Persons (1989), for which he received the Olive Schreiner Prize, and Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), featuring the two stories that won him the Thomas Pringle Award.

A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with "a plan". Fashioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas's help in clearing the land and planning his mansion. Slowly but inevitably, the stranger's charm and the novel's richly inventive language draws Malgas into "the plan" and he sees, feels and moves into the new building. Then, just as remorselessly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air.

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

Lavishly published by Sylph Editions with the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, the "Cahiers Series" features some of the most venerable names in publishing and makes available new explorations in writing and translation. "A Labour of Moles", the newest addition to this groundbreaking series, is a postmodern fable by Ivan Vladislavic, one of South Africa's most imaginative writers. In this playful riddle, the reader is taken down to the perspective of an unidentified word in a dictionary. Accompanied by nineteen spectacular color illustrations, Vladislavic's "Labour of Moles" takes the reader where few have trod - inside the building blocks of fiction itself.

Mr and Mrs Malgas are going quietly about their lives when a mysterious squatter appears on the vacant plot next to their home. Arriving with portmanteau in hand and a head full of extraordinary ideas, the stranger at once begins to fashion tools and cutlery from old iron and rubbish. Soon he enlists Mr Malgas's help: drawn in by the stranger's conviction, Mr Malgas clears the land, all the while struggling to catch sight of the grand mansion that is supposedly springing up around them. His vision, however, continues to fail him - until, one day, it doesn't. When The Folly appeared in South Africa in 1993, with its story of the seductive and dangerous illusions language can breed, it was read as an evocative allegory of the rise and fall of apartheid. Vladislavic's remarkable first novel is sure to strike new chords for contemporary readers.

"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job." In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years, Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories--unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure--and examines where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and pays tribute to the writers-- such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and DeLillo--who have been important to him as both a reader and an author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a field of debris, stands Vladislavic's Loss Library itself, the shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page, Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic "In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination."--Andre Brink "The prose is stunning. It gives the impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the inside--as though the author lives on the other side of language, where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put together produces complicated patterned exchanges like minuets."--Tony Morphet

It is 1993, and Aubrey Tearle's world is shutting down. He has recently retired from a lifetime of proofreading telephone directories. His favorite neighborhood haunt in Johannesburg, the Cafe Europa, is about to close its doors; the familiar old South Africa is already gone. Standards, he grumbles, are in decline, so bad-tempered, conservative Tearle embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow citizens. The results are disastrous, hilarious, and poignant.Ivan Vladislavic is the author of a number of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction books. He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

‘You can't rush the building of a new house. You've got to get the whole thing clear in the mind's eye.’ Mr and Mrs Malgas are going quietly about their lives when an eccentric squatter called Nieuwenhuizen arrives on the vacant plot next to their home and plans to build an elaborate mansion. Slowly, Father, as Nieuwenhuizen likes to be called, draws Mr Malgas into his grand scheme, while Mrs Malgas keeps an anxious watch from her lounge window. When The folly first appeared it was read as an evocative allegory on the rise and fall of apartheid. Twenty years on, this remarkably open text is sure to strike a new set of chords. Grimly humorous and playfully serious, Ivan Vladislavic’s classic first novel is a comic and philosophical masterpiece.

Ivan Vladislavic's latest collection of short stories exemplifies the sly wit and formal innovation that have gained him international acclaim.