Written in 1957, when North African independence movements were gaining momentum, The Colonizer and the Colonized studies the enduring legacy, political as much as psychological, of colonisation throughout the world.

Albert Memmi depicts colonialism as a disease of the European but crucially he demonstrates that colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized, providing penetrating insights into colonial inheritance and resistance that remain as relevant today. One of the great works of twentieth-century political thought, The Colonizer and the Colonized speaks to experiences in the Global South as well as European countries such as Britain and France, who are still struggling with their imperial pasts. In revealing the mechanisms of colonial oppression, it also highlights the origins of all oppression of one group by another.

This edition includes introductions by two of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century: South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Ten fictions, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead, and the avarice of the town's survivors. In "The Diamond Mine" a woman remembers her first, passionately erotic experience, hidden, in the company of her parents, with a soldier who may not be alive to remember her. The anopheles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed with in 'The Emissary'. 'Mission Statement' is the story of a Development Agency official's idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government minister that ends with an irony that astounds her. 'The Generations Gap' turns the 'gap' upside down when a father's bid for freedom shocks his adult children. In 'Homage' one of Europe's aliens visits the grave of the politician he was paid to assassinate. In 'Karma', Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business – critically, wittily – and questions the nature of existence.

A Messiah of the Last Days (1974) was C. J. Driver's fourth novel. A profound meditation on politics and a complex portrait of English society, it is also fast-paced and suspenseful. Its narrator is Tom Grace, a pragmatic, efficient London barrister with a comfortable life. But his ordered world is unsettled by his involvement with a young man he defends in court - John Buckleson, the charismatic leader of an anarchic movement calling themselves The Free People. Though deeply divided in many ways, the two men are drawn to each other by a common dream of creating a new social and moral order. Buckleson, though, is a figure of interest to more people than those who subscribe to his vision. 'C. J. Driver's exceptional alertness to our times is matched by the power and zest of his evocative writing, lit up by wry wit.' Nadine Gordimer.

For years, it has been what is called a 'deteriorating situation'. Now all over South Africa the cities are battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family - liberal whites - are rescued from the terror by their servant, July, who leads them to refuge in his native village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July - the shifts in character and relationships - gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings between blacks and whites.

These stories take the reader on journeys across cultures, from the war in Mozambique to the beaches of the South of France, from the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg to the back streets of London, over political territories from the Underground to revolution. Gordimer brings to life unforgettable characters from every corner of society, in a vivid, disturbing portrait of life in South Africa under apartheid.

To find out more about the author, visit www.bloomsbury.com/nadinegordimer

'Gordimer’s latest collection of short stories nimbly examines South Africa’s interweaving of the political and the personal, while coolly disregarding the comforts of cant. Empowered by a perfect ear and a formidable imaginative confidence, she offers an orchestra of strange narrative voices — a child refugee fleeing civil war in Mozambique; a black activist’s deserted wife waiting for better times; a white farmer responding to the death of his illegitimate black son — without once sounding a false note … a predictably intelligent and assured collection' —Zoe Heller, Independent on Sunday

'Marvellous … Nadine Gordimer doesn’t tell so much as uncloak' —Observer

'Gutsily modern … Gordimer is one of the greats. These stories are intellectual frighteners that always catch you, if not in the conscience, then in the heart' —Mail on Sunday

'Gordimer has rarely been more profound or more quietly brilliant than in these exquisitely subtle stories, whose power is equal to a thousand manifestos' —Publishers Weekly

'The tales in Jump are not committed to a specific political ideology but to the grand task of spiritual examination and social redemptino ... this expansive vision, its moral power and artistic integrity, is what elevates her fiction among that of most of her contemporaries' —New York Times Book Review

Nadine Gordimer's subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships seething in the South Africa of the day.

Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. As the upheaval in Mehring's world increasingly resembles that in the country as a whole, it becomes clear that only a seismic shift in ideas and concrete action can avert annihilation.

Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced. In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.

Few writers have so consistently taken stock of the society in which they have lived. In a letter to fellow Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes this impressive volume as 'a modest book of some of the non-fiction pieces I've written, a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in.' It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, appreciations of fellow writers and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991. We may examine here Nadine Gordimer's evidence of the inequities of Apartheid as she saw them in 1959, her shocking account of the bans on literature still in effect in the mid-1970s, through to South Africa's emergence in 1994 as a country free at last, a view from the queue on that first day blacks and whites voted together plus updates on subsequent events. Gordimer's canvas is global and her themes wide-ranging. She examines the impact of technology on our expanding world-view, the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction and she reassesses the role of the writer in the world today.

Throughout her career the internationally renowned South African writer Nadine Gordimer has built a literary reputation with her incisive short stories as much as with her acclaimed novels. Together with her essays, this highly imaginative and committed body of work won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. In the opinion of the Academy: 'Through her magnificent epic writing she has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity.' Gordimer has said that while novelists take the reader by the hand developing 'a consistency of relationship that does not and cannot convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.' Now, for the first time, the best of her stories are published in one volume.

A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds. The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie's response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa's oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie's story, as one critic puts it, offers "an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes" that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets' refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africa's bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As "a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts," Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggie's Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie's narrative celebrates humanity's relentless drive to survive at any cost. This new edition of Boetie's out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams' haunting poem, "Soweto Funeral," composed after attending Boetie's interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.

Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in that field-from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives-literature and politics-infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe-inspiring nature-including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities-political, moral, and social-of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.

A startling new work from a Nobel prize-winning author: ten short stories, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead, and the avarice of the town's survivors. In 'The Diamond Mine' a woman remembers her first, passionately erotic experience, hidden, in the company of her parents, with a soldier who may not be alive to remember her. The anopheles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed with in 'The Emissary'. In 'Karma', Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business - critically, wittily - and questions the nature of existence.

A "New York Times" Notable Book
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa "Ranks as one of Gordimer's best novels...It transcends politics and aims at a meaning higher than human striving."---"The Philadelphia Inquirer" When Julie Summers's car breaks down on a street in Cape Town, a young Arab mechanic comes to her aid. Their attraction to each other is immediate. Julia, the daughter of a powerful businessman, is trying to escape a privileged background she despises. Abdu, an educated but poor illegal immigrant, is desperate to evade deportation. The consequences of this chance meeting are unpredictable and intense, as each person's notions of the other are overturned. Set in the social mix of post-apartheid South Africa and an unnamed Arab country, Nadine Gordimer's "The Pickup" "is a masterpiece of creative empathy...a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it also opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception" (Edward W. Said).

"A perfect example of what literature can give us that history books cannot."--Francine Prose, "The New York Times Book Review" A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice Steve and Jabulile, once clandestine lovers under a racist law forbidding sexual relations between black and white, are living in a newly free South Africa. Both were combatants in the struggle against apartheid, and now, he, a university lecturer, and she, a lawyer, are parents of children born in freedom. But as the ideals of this "better life for all" are challenged by the realities of the world around them, Steve and Jabulile consider leaving the country they so vehemently fought to free.
The subject in "No Time Like the Present "is contemporary, but Nadine Gordimer's treatment is, as ever, timeless. In the telling of this conflicted couple, she captures the fragmented essence of a nation.

"With the scaffolding of a courtroom drama and the moral underpinnings of the state's responsibility, the novel infuses an isolated crime of passion with the atmospheric pressure of a country reeling from its own past." --"The Boston Sunday Globe"A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary daily life. How else can you defend yourself against intruders and thieves in post-apartheid South Africa? The respected executive director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with "something that could never happen to them" Their son, Duncan, has murdered a man. In this powerful and disturbing anatomy of a murder, Nadine Gordimer examines the effect of violence on the complicated web of love that holds together parents and children, friends and lovers.

A new collection of short stories from the author of My Son's Story. In 16 stories ranging from the dynamics of family life to the worldwide confusion of human values, Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer gives readers access to many lives in places as far apart as suburban London, Mozambique, a mythical island, and South Africa.

Rarely have world writers of such variety and distinction appeared together in the same anthology. Their stories capture the range of emotions and situations of our human universe: tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war in different continents and cultures. They are not about HIV / AIDS. But all twenty-one writers have given their stories--chosen by themselves as representing some of the best of their lifetime work as storytellers--without any fee or royalty.
"Telling Tales" is being published in more than twelve countries. The publisher's profits from the sales of this book will go to HIV / AIDS preventive education and for medical treatment for people living with the suffering this pandemic infection brings to our contemporary world. So when you buy this unique anthology of renowned storytellers as a gift or for your own reading pleasure, you are also making a gift to combat the plague of our new millennium.
Nadine Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, is the author of fourteen novels, nine volumes of stories, and three nonfiction collections. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. This anthology is a literary part of a worldwide effort to raise money for fighting HIV/AIDS.
Rarely have world writers of such variety and distinction appeared together in the same anthology. Their stories capture the range of emotions and situations of our human universe: tragedy, comedy, fantasy, satire, dramas of sexual love and of war in different continents and cultures. These tales are not about HIV/AIDS. But all twenty-one writers have given their stories--chosen by themselves as representing some of the best of their lifetime work as storytellers--without any fee or royalty.
"Telling Tales" is published in more than twelve countries. The publishers' profits from the sales of this book go to HIV/AIDS preventive education, and for medical treatment for people living with the suffering this pandemic infection brings to our contemporary world. This unique collection of renowned storytellers is much more than a gathering of great literature; it is a gift to combat the plague of our new millennium.
"A stellar roster, including five Nobelists--Gordimer, Grass, Oe, Marquez, and Saramago--offers 21 stories in a fundraising effort for HIV and AIDS in southern Africa."--"Kirkus Reviews"
"The 21 stellar writers in this international short-story collection include five Nobel winners. All the stories were chosen by the writers themselves and contributed without any fee, and all profits go to fight HIV-AIDS in southern Africa. The stories are not about AIDS, but several are about war and about dying. In Njabulo Ndbele's 'Death of a Son, ' parents fight to get their child's body from the apartheid police. 'The Ultimate Safari, ' by Gordimer, who edited the anthology, is a searing, unforgettable account of a desperate refugee child hiding from the fancy tourists in a famous game park. In contrast, Woody Allen has contributed his hilarious "New Yorker" piece lampooning the financier whose kid was turned down by a prestigious Manhattan preschool. There are also fine stories by Margaret Atwood, Hanef Kureishi, Arthur Miller, Salman Rushdie, and more."--"Booklist "
"A stellar roster, including five Nobelists--Gordimer, Grass, Oe, Marquez, and Saramago--offers 21 stories in a fundraising effort for HIV and AIDS in southern Africa. Chinua Achebe's 'Sugar Baby' is a razor-edged retrospective look at one man's inability to adjust to deprivation in the midst of protracted war. Margaret Atwood's stunning 'The Age of Lead' juxtaposes the narrator's watching news reports about a sailor frozen on an ill-fated Arctic expedition with memories of her lifelong friend, bonded since their teens by a desire for a 'life without consequences.' Now, Vincent is dead at 43 of 'a mutated virus that didn't even have a name yet'--the consequence of 'things you don't even know you've done.' In the powerful 'The Ultimate Safari, ' Gordimer's narrator, a young girl in Mozambique whose mother has disappeared and whose father is in the war, flees with her grandparents. They walk for days through Kruger Park, 'a kind of whole country of animals--elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles'--to a refugee camp, where they live for more than two years, so long that the grandmother, whose husband disappeared on the trek, feels there is no home to return to. 'Bulldog, ' Arthur Miller's straightforward Brooklyn coming-of-age story, revolves around a seductive woman selling puppies, while Njabule S. Ndebele's heartbreaking 'Death of a Son' chronicles the two weeks it takes for a young Johannesburg couple to get back their child's body, killed when soldiers and police patrolling the township began shooting. Saramago's 'The Centaur' is the beautifully wrought parable of the last Centaur to survive, wandering for centuries until there is no longer a wilderness to hide in. John Updike's ponderous 'The Journey to the Dead, ' about a man's self-serving and increasingly awkward visits to a dying woman who was his ex-wife's best friend, is one of the few clinkers. By its nature more somber than not, a variety of voices with important stories."--"Kirkus Reviews "

Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of her years as a public figure--an observer of apartheid and its aftermath, a member of the ANC, and the champion of dissident writers everywhere.

In a letter to fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes Living in Hope and History as a "modest book of some of the nonfiction pieces I've written, a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in." It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991.