At Home With Ivan Vladislavic is the first comprehensive analysis of the works of Ivan Vladislavic. Bringing a flaneur's "internal GPS" to postcolonial Johannesburg, Vladislavic established a critical sense of home via an intimate knowledge of geography and history. This sense of belonging can have positive ecological effects as we tend to protect what we know. The flaneur's deep word hoard also helped him to develop a minimalist style, which was not only a means of living sustainably in the city, but in its humour and close attention to detail a way to make greening the city more of a joy than a duty. In this way, Vladislavic created a culture of sustainability.

Ivan Vladislavic is one of the most significant writers in South Africa today. Internationally his stature rests on his responsiveness to the contemporary, his humour, his honed style, his articulation of the search for home within the urban, his delicate balance between immersion and objectivity. These qualities appeal especially to those who have migrated to the big urban spaces of the world. Locally he has been positioned by critics as the voice of the 'now' in post-apartheid letters for his forensic analysis of South Africa in transition from the exceptional and marginalised to the merely marginal. That he finds many of the promises of democracy betrayed is axiomatic; that he discovers some alternative to this betrayal in a creative consciousness and minimalist mode of writing that pays detailed attention to the marginal is crucial. This edited volume collects much of the significant and original critical material, ranging from reviews to interviews to full length articles, so far published on Vladislavic's individual works. In compiling the book, Gerald Gaylard has chosen critical material of diverse opinion and form, from the scholarly to the casual and creative, in order to indicate the wideranging and fertile responses that Vladislavic's writing elicits. Moreover, he has included examples of the initial reception of each of Vladislavic's books upon their publication. Marginal Spaces offers therefore not only a critical celebration of Vladislavic via a sense of the reception of his works, but also a sense of how literary and cultural production and reading have changed since the end of apartheid via a collection of the original interpretive directions that his work has been part of, enabled and encouraged. This critical material will be of benefit to readers and scholars of Vladislavic and post-apartheid South African literature, especially postcolonial city writing.