71 Roeland St, Cape Town 8001 – Tel 021 462 2425 – Fax 021 462 2424 – email booklounge@gmail.com
Saturday, March 31st 2012 at 11:00 AM
This year we want to read you all the classics bit by bit and today we are reading the Gingerbread Man, the tale of the classy cat, Puss in Boots and last but not least, Rapunzel. It is always good to listen to stories that have been told over and over, because you know they are magic!
And of course we will do some colouring in, which will make it the perfect way to start your Saturday.
Friday, March 30th 2012 at 6:00 PM
The imprint Picador is turning 40 with 40 parties in 40 cities around the world.
Book Lounge is honoured to host the Cape Town bash with a black and white party to celebrate the re-jacketing of 12 of their best books in black on white designs.
To give it a local flair, we will be having an art auction of local artists, from graffiti artists to yarn bombers, who have all donated a piece of work to be autioned and the proceeds will go to our library project this year, which is assisting Parkhurst Primary, Mitchell’s Plain in setting up their own library. Please join us from a glass of bubbly and celebrate the beauty of the book.
Dress code: Black and White
Speakers: The author, Andre P. Brink and his wife, Karina Szczurek will talk about their love for books and celebrat the design of books. They are big fans of hardback copies with beautifully designed spines and jackets!
The art auction will be a silent auction and all are encouraged to partake, we hope to have more than 20 original works which can be bought in aid of a our library project.
Thursday, March 29th 2012 at 5:30 PM
“Parys…die stad wat ek bo alle ander liefhet” – het André Brink in sy outobiografie geskryf. Herinneringe aan Parys bevat ’n keur uit sy destydse boeke oor Parys: Pot-Pourri (1962) en Parys-Parys: Retoer(1969).
Nadat hy in die sestigerjare in Parys gewoon het, het sy sketse en verhale oor sy ervaringe van die lewe in die Franse hoofstad eers in koerante hier en daarna in boekvorm verskyn. Sy indrukke van verskillende aspekte van die lewe in Parys is met fyn waarnemingsin geskryf.
Die toonaard wissel tussen humor en erns, tussen speels en indringend; daar is besinning en daar is satire, deernis en spot. Heerlike, leesbare stories oor hierdie gewilde wêreldstad.
Thursday, March 29th 2012 at 4:11 PM
…of just some of the gorgeous works of art that will be available for auction at the Picador 40th Birthday Party tomorrow (Friday 30th March). In the silent auction bids will start at R300, and the highest bidders will walk away with a stunning and original work of art. Artworks have been donated, so the entire proceeds go towards funding the Parkhurst Primary School Library in Mitchell’s Plain. This is the first event of Open Book 2012.
Wednesday, March 28th 2012 at 5:30 PM
Welbekende rugbyskrywer Louis de Villiers maak sy buiging as romanskrywer met hierdie aksiebelaaide, snaakse, adrenaliengedrewe roman.
Louis sal in gesprek verkeer met Rachelle Greeff.
Hierdie een is NIE vir sissies nie!
Uitgegee deur Queillerie, ‘n druknaam van NB Uitgewers.
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Tuesday, March 27th 2012 at 3:04 PM
Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has escaped the urban estate where he was raised and made a new life for himself amid the colleges and spires of Cambridge. He has grown to love the quiet routine of his life as a care assistant at a local nursing home, where he has forged a close friendship with the home’s most ill-tempered resident, Dr. Paulsen. But when he meets and falls in love with Iris Bellwether, a beautiful and enigmatic medical student at King’s College, Oscar is drawn into her world of scholarship and privilege, and soon becomes embroiled in the strange machinations of her brilliant but troubled brother, Eden, who believes he can adapt the theories of a forgotten Baroque composer to heal people with music. Eden’s self-belief knows no bounds, and as he draws his sister and closed circle of friends into a series of disturbing experiments to prove himself right, Oscar realises the extent of the danger facing them all…
“The Bellwether Revivals is a stunningly good debut novel, a thrilling story of music and its hold on a group of young people’s minds and lives. Benjamin Wood writes with vigour, precision and intensity, with a story that will keep readers up all night.” Steven Galloway, author of The Cellist of Sarajevo
“In prose that’s unfussy but effortlessly vivid, filled with nice descriptive flourishes (he’s good at quite difficult things, such as describing the growing sound of music as it thickens the air of a room), Wood’s confident, sometimes creepy novel draws you in – like the faintly heard strain from that hauntingly played pipe-organ – and then, once you’re inside, holds on, ever tightening the grip.” Independent on Sunday
Even as a young man, Hamid Farsi is acclaimed as a master of the art of calligraphy. But as time goes by, he sees that weaknesses in the Arabic language and its script limit its uses in the modern world. In a secret society, he works out schemes for radical reform, never guessing what risks he is running. His beautiful wife, Noura, is ignorant of the great plans on her husband’s mind. She knows only his cold, avaricious side and so it is no wonder she feels flattered by the attentions of his amusing, lively young apprentice. And so begins a passionate love story of a Muslim woman and a Christian man.
“‘Warmly observed, richly detailed, and often bold and exciting, Schami’s fine portrait of life in Damascus, Syria, in the middle of the 20th century is filled with a compelling set of characters…A novel to be savored.” Publishers Weekly
“The background to this bold and political novel is cosmopolitan: Jews, Armenians, Arabs and Iranians live cheek by jowl in Schami’s Damascus. Finely rendered into English by Anthea Bell, The Calligrapher’s Secret is a celebration of diversity.” Times Literary Supplement
Citizens of our beloved Democratic Republic of North Korea! Imagine the life of an orphan boy plucked from nowhere to be trained as a tunnel assassin, a kidnapper, a spy.
He has no father but the State, no sweetheart but Sun Moon, the greatest opera star who ever lived, whose face is tattooed on his chest.
Imagine he lives in our very own country, a model of exemplary Communism. A nation that is the envy of the world, especially the Americans. Where the only stories people need to hear are those blasting out of loudspeakers to the glory of our dear Leader, Kim Jong il.
Dry your eyes now, comrades! Prepare to hear the Greatest North Korean Love Story Ever Told.
The Orphan Master’s Son is an iconoclastic work of fiction, part thriller, part coming-of-age story, part love story. Dark, playful and genre-defying, its searing depiction of one man’s epic journey through the surrealist brutality of North Korea shines a fierce light on the essence of the human condition.
Warning: Any resemblance to real people or events may not be entirely coincidental
“Real and riveting…This is a novel worth getting excited about. Johnson’s book is an audacious act of imagination: an intimate narrative about one of the most closed nations on Earth…recalls George Orwell’s 1984…but it’s a funnier and warmer book than that. Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which Johnson is painting here.” Washington Post
“Mr. Johnson has written a daring and remarkable novel, a novel that not only opens a frightening window on the mysterious kingdom of North Korea, but one that also excavates the very meaning of love and sacrifice.” New York Times
“Remarkable…Mr. Johnson is a wonderfully flexible writer who can pivot in a matter of lines from absurdity to atrocity. We don’t know what’s really going on in that strange place, but a disquieting glimpse suggesting what it must be like can be found in this brilliant and timely novel.” Wall Street Journal
“Fast-paced and intriguing..this complex, multi-voiced narrative will remind some readers of David Mitchell’s similarly inventive tale, Cloud Atlas…It is magnificent.” Financial Times
“Adam Johnson has managed to capture the atmosphere of this hermit kingdom better than any writer I’ve read…The Orphan Master’s Son deserves a place up there with dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.” Guardian
“A flamboyantly grim epic of totalitarianism…this larger-than-life, two-fisted picaresque manages to be a page-turner.. an ambitious book.” Sunday Times
Six wealthy suburban women, accompanied by their handsome personal trainer Harry, embark on a six day luxury tour into the desolate Namibian heartland.
In what should have been a week of fun and adventure, they find themselves abandoned in the middle of nowhere. Ill equipped, they have no option but to start walking to find help. Tested to their limits in that harsh environment, nature adds to their struggle by throwing in a couple of hyenas and a rogue lioness.
Injured, filthy, hungry and thirsty they are forced to re-evaluate the very meaning of their existence during five days of hell, as time runs out on their search for civilisation. Are they all mentally and physically equipped to finish the journey…?
Okay, so his credit card is maxed, his boss hates him, his father is a world-class alcoholic and his hairline, like the country, is showing signs of recession. But everything will come right if he sticks to his New Year’s resolutions. All he needs to do to get his life back on track is bag himself a great new job, lose 9 kgs, get a girlfriend (blonde, not too much admin) and get 250 Facebook friends without too many freaks. Easy. Or so he tells himself. But in reality the odds are stacked against the Jasonator. He may have the best collection of branded jeans in the paint retail industry — and, let’s face it, nothing is more important than that, right? — but turning his life around is going to require a lot more than just a change of trousers (although this, too, may well be on the cards). Will this be the year that Jason finally gets it together and gets one over those who are intent on dragging him down — his boss, the body corporate, estate agents, his sickeningly successful friends…or will it be known forever as the year of the gherkin?
A bold and brilliant debut from a darkly funny new voice.
Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for a piece called Variations on Tram Timetables. He is married to a Californian art dealer named Laura and he lives with two cats, named after Russian composers, in an Eastern European city. But this book isn’t really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. He has entrusted an old university friend with the task of looking after his cats, and taking care of his perfect, beautiful apartment.
Despite the fact that Oskar has left dozens of surreally detailed notes covering every aspect of looking after the flat, things do not go well.
Care of Wooden Floors is about how a tiny oversight can trip off a disastrous and farcical (fatal, even) chain of consequences. It’s about a friendship between two men who don’t know each other very well. It’s about alienation and being alone in a foreign city. It’s about the quest for perfection and the struggle against entropy. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.
“A very funny novel combining schadenfreude and belly laughs. Just don’t let Wiles flat-sit for you.” Independent
“Highly idiosyncratic, well-written, with a vivid sense of place – compelling.” Michael Frayn
“…ingenious…his story has something in common, in terms of manic sensitivity, with Edgar Allan Poes’ The Tell-Tale Heart…[with] deft and precise descriptive asides. This is a smart and polished debut.” Daily Telegraph
David Goldblatt’s In Boksburg stands as one of the most important observations of a middle-class white community in South Africa during the apartheid years. Published in 1982, it presents an accumulation of everyday details from the community of Boksburg through which a larger portrait is revealed of white societal values within a racially divided state. “Blacks are not of this town,” writes Goldblatt. “They serve it, trade with it, receive charity from it and are ruled, rewarded and punished by its precepts. Some, on occasion, are its privileged guests. But all who go there, do so by permit or invitation, never by right.” This facsimile reproduces all 71 black-and-white photographs as well as Goldblatt’s eloquent introduction to the work, and noted writer and editor, Joanna Lehan, contributes a contemporary essay written for this volume.
The poet, painter and printmaker Peter Clarke has been a seminal influence and inspiration to many artist and writers of his generation. Although Clarke is best known for his work which reflects the harsh social realities of urban and rural life at the Cape, he has for the last decade worked on a series of collages accompanied by prose entitled Fanfare. The 100 fan-shaped collages have been inspired by historical, literary, political and imaginary figures, as well as friends.
Accompanying each fan is a short piece of writing either by the character, or Clarke’s thoughts on him/her from a very personal and often humorous point of view. A fascinating insight into Clarke’s personality and inspirations, and a beautiful collection too.
Kate Ascher could not have chosen a much drier topic for a book than water mains, parking meters, railroad classification yards, and the other doodads of city infrastructure. But in Ascher’s captivating book, The Works, the innards of New York City come alive. Wonderfully illustrated, the book combines text, maps, and other graphics to tell the story of the systems that keep America’s greatest city running smoothly. How are traffic lights coordinated? How do potholes form and which areas have streets with the best ‘smoothness score’? How is mail processed? What happens when you flush the toilet? Ascher, who has a PhD in government from the London School of Economics and is now executive vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, dissects the colorful workings of all these systems and much more.
The Works contains a section on pretty much every aspect of the Big Apple’s infrastructure. Ascher explains how the city’s 23 million daily pieces of mail are processed. We also learn about the 27-mile underground pneumatic mail tube that used to carry canisters with 500 letters up to 30 miles per hour around Manhattan. Also interesting: the story of the nine-foot-long, 800-pound robot submarine that city engineers send to probe leaks in the Delaware Aqueduct – which, it might interest you to know, is the world’s longest continuous underground tunnel. And you’ll find out all about Colonel Waring and his ‘White Wings’. A great coffee table book for city dwellers or anyone with a curiosity bone.
“The Works is both a reference guide and a geeky pleasure.” Time Out, New York
“It’s a rare person who won’t find something of interest in The Works, whether it’s an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what’s down a manhole.” New York Post
Manfred Zylla: Art & Resistance is a collector’s edition of 100 signed copies. Each book is sold with an accompanying two colour woodcut, with an option of four different designs. This is the first comprehensive book on Manfred Zylla’s long career as an artist and includes illustrations of artworks dating back to 1959 to the present. The book is compiled and written by Heidi Erdmann.
Zylla was born in Germany in 1939, living as a child through the ravages of World War II and its aftermath. Resident in South Africa since 1970, he became prominent as an artist highly critical of apartheid in the 1980s with a stream of drawings, prints and paintings. These works are widely acknowledged as critical for understanding resistance art, an important chapter in South African art history. Zylla has continued to work within a paradigm of social critique, producing works about globalisation and the social and political circumstances, forces and ills at play in South Africa and the world at large. To that end he has made works about pollution, global warming and natural resources, capitalism, crime, drugs, refugees, alternative energy and transport and importantly attitudes towards disability.
Zylla’s collection of artworks tell of the plight of the world, and point to his strong concern with the destiny of humanity, the future of the planet, and art as a tool for change.
Think back to when you were a child. More than likely, there will be a fuzzy memory stored away about a solemn promise made between best friends and sealed with the intertwining of pinky fingers. This is what is known as a pinky swear or promise, which is the title of photographer Pierre Crocquet de Rosemond’s latest book.
Pinky Promise is a powerful and thought-provoking exhibition about childhood sexual abuse and healing, his three intense years of photography and interviews are distilled into a narrative of abuse, survival and healing. He presents the stories of five victims and three perpetrators with sensitivity, a robust stance on sexual offences and a desire to understand a social ill that has become alarmingly prevalent in our society.
Crocquet grew up in Klerksdorp, a small town approximately 161 kilometres west of Johannesburg. He graduated with a financial degree from University of Cape Town and moved to London, where he worked in various merchant banks. Disillusionment with the banking world soon followed, and he left the finance sector to study photography at the London College of Printing. He returned to South Africa in 2000, and his early work reflected this by focusing on life in South Africa and on the rest of the continent.
Ruth Harris writes beautifully and engagingly on a moment in French history that polarised society and undermined the French state; the repercussions of which were felt up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
At the end of September 1894 a charlady stole an undated and unsigned letter from the wastepaper bin of the German military attaché in Paris. Torn to pieces but stuck back together by French intelligence, this document contained French military secrets. By the middle of October a Jewish captain in the army called Alfred Dreyfus was accused of being its author. As it turned out, he was entirely innocent, but at the time few questioned the verdict of the subsequent court martial, nor the unanimous decision to sentence him to a life of penal servitude. Public opinion was outraged, and the War Minister, General Auguste Mercier, asked for the reintroduction of the death penalty so Dreyfus could be guillotined. Although the request was turned down, Dreyfus was still subjected to special conditions: rather than going to New Caledonia like other transported convicts, he was sent to the much harsher Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana, and condemned to solitary confinement in murderous conditions. The French authorities did not expect – and probably did not want - him to survive.
So undisputed was Dreyfus’ conviction at the time, that no one had any inkling it would be queried, let alone that the case would become the scandal that nearly brought down the French state. It changed the political course of the nation and transformed the way the country viewed itself and was viewed by others.
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2010 and the 2010 National Jewish Book Award for Biography.
“An extraordinary study of the affair as a tragic drama that swept up a man, his family and friends, and more widely French society and the French state.” New York Review of Books
“A triumph of research and analysis.” Irish Times
“Ruth Harris offers us one of the most thorough and eloquent accounts of this turbulent episode.” Scotland on Sunday
“Ruth Harris’ minutely detailed examination of the rich mulch from which the Dreyfus case sprouted its fleurs du mal, adds a new level of learning to the affair that defined 20th-century France.” Telegraph
“a highly imaginative, deeply-researched inquiry into the battle over Dreyfus which revels in paradox and complexity.” Times Literary Supplement
“Harris is a first-rate narrative historian… What marks Harris’s contribution is her formidable research skills, her exceptionally wide general and historical reading, and her always interesting eye for the revealing anecdote or pen portrait.” Guardian
“Scrupulous and well-written… Harris is to be thanked for the care and measure of her sifting and weighing, and for the deep historical perspective that she brings to the undertaking.” Christopher Hitchens
Though primarily known as a novelist, over thirty years William Gibson has also built up a reputation as one of our most entertaining and insightful critics of contemporary culture. He is widely credited with having described the internet and cyberspace before any such things existed. Distrust that Particular Flavor brings together for the first time his writings on a wide variety of contemporary subjects: the differing cultures of Japan and Singapore; music and the movies; what’s wrong with the internet; the interactive relationship between writers and readers; and many others. Also included in the book is a fascinating autobiographical sketch: his upbringing in the South, the early death of his parents and his escape into books; and the move to Canada to avoid the draft. Over the years Gibson has been eagerly commissioned by Wired, Rolling Stone, the New York Times and other influential journals, as well as tiny publishers, online sources and magazines that no longer exist. These collected writings grant readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture.
One minute, 11-year-old Carmen is watching her hippy mum put curlers in for the first time, the next she is being dragged with her sister through LA airport with her mother muttering about ‘the patriarchy’ under her breath. The three of them board a plane that takes them to Peru, next door to Chile – from which the family had fled after Pinochet’s coup. Eight days after landing in Lima, and still perplexed by their mother’s disguises and lies, they’re off again, on a bus bound they know not where. They then spend most of the next decade, the 1980s, moving from dictatorship to dictatorship, evading capture, torture and peril at every turn. It is no way to spend your teenage years, until, overnight, it becomes the way Carmen herself chooses – She writes: “It is not my intention to present myself as a hero or a martyr. On the contrary, Something Fierce is the story of a resistance member living in fear. Fear that my political convictions would not be strong enough to keep myself committed to a cause that I believed in but which clashed with my other desires: to live a normal life, to sleep a full night’s sleep, to dance and laugh and talk nonsense without my radar up, without having to watch every word, every choice I make.”
“South Africa is still living an apartheid narrative, and even, in perverse ways, recreating it.”
The one thing that looms largest in South Africa’s future is South Africa’s past – most especially the nearly five decades of division and conflict at the heart of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous social experiments.
Apartheid, An Illustrated History is a portrait of the defining experience of modern South Africa’s transition from colonial state to democracy. What began in May 1948 as a vague, grimly ambitious project to interrupt history and engineer white supremacy at the expense of the country’s black majority spawned forty-six years of repressive authoritarianism and bitter resistance which claimed the lives of thousands and pushed the country to the brink of civil conflict.
A provocative postscript examines apartheid’s stubborn afterlife in the years since 1994, suggesting that the optimism and democratic vitality of the constitutional state hinge on South Africans avoiding simplistic views of the past that might lend themselves to demagoguery. For all its catastrophic and lingering effects, the book concludes, apartheid was disarmed, ultimately, by the society’s much longer history of inseparability.
Journalist Michael Morris draws on the work of scholars and historians as well as contemporary reporting in an unsentimental and highly readable account, vividly complemented by photographs and cartoons. Michael Morris began his career in journalism in 1979. He spent three years in London in the 1980s as a foreign correspondent for the Argus group of newspapers, returning to a posting in Parliament that spanned the last days of PW Botha and the first year of Nelson Mandela’s post-1994 government. Morris is the author of a history of South Africa, Every Step of the Way, commissioned by the South African History Project to commemorate the 10th anniversary of democracy in 2004, as well as Paging Through History – 150 years with the Cape Argus 1857-2007.
The Unconquered tells the extraordinary true story of a journey into the deepest recesses of the Amazon to track one of the planet’s last uncontacted indigenous tribes.
Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilisation. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the unconquered, the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon’s uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest’s secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe—the mysterious flecheiros, or ‘People of the Arrow’, seldom-glimpsed warriors known to repulse all intruders with showers of deadly arrows. On assignment for National Geographic, Wallace joins Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo at the head of a thirty-four-man team that ventures deep into the unknown in search of the tribe. Possuelo’s mission is to protect the Arrow People. But the information he needs to do so can only be gleaned by entering a world of permanent twilight beneath the forest canopy.
Danger lurks at every step as the expedition seeks out the Arrow People even while trying to avoid them. Along the way, Wallace uncovers clues as to who the Arrow People might be, how they have managed to endure as one of the last unconquered tribes, and why so much about them must remain shrouded in mystery if they are to survive. Laced with lessons from anthropology and the Amazon’s own convulsed history, and boasting a Conradian cast of unforgettable characters – all driven by a passion to preserve the wild, but also wracked by fear, suspicion, and the desperate need to make it home alive – The Unconquered reveals this critical battleground in the fight to save the planet as it has rarely been seen, wrapped in a page-turning tale of adventure.
From President Obama’s political rhetoric to the housing bubble bust, James Geary proves in this fascinating and entertaining book that every aspect of our experience is molded by metaphor.
“It is the East, and Juliet is the sun” is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines and one of the most well-known metaphors in literature. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. It is also intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from ordinary conversation and commercial messaging to news reports and political speeches. Metaphor is at work in all fields of human endeavor, including economics, business, science, and psychology. In I Is an Other, James Geary takes readers from Aristotle’s investigation of metaphor right up to the latest neuroscientific insights into how metaphor works in the brain. Along the way, he demonstrates how metaphor affects financial decision making, how metaphor lurks behind effective advertisements, how metaphor inspires learning and discovery, and how metaphor can be used as a tool to achieve emotional insight and psychological change. Geary also explores how a life without metaphor, as experienced by some people with autism spectrum disorders, significantly changes the way a person interacts with the world. As Geary demonstrates, metaphor has leapt off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness. Witty, persuasive, and original, I Is an Other showcases how a simple way with words, which in the past was considered a tool only for poets, is really a driving force in our society.
The recent News Corporation scandal has catapulted Murdoch and his global media empire into the public eye as perhaps never before. In the English-speaking world, and increasingly in ‘untapped’ but potentially lucrative markets such as China, Murdoch wields an influence as political kingmaker second to none. How did he do it? How did this empire, a loose ‘archipelago’ of media islands large and small, come to be so successful and influential? How did it all come to the current, disastrous state? And will the empire survive the recent scandal that has outraged people around the world and rocked the media? Building on many years’ research and featuring many previously undisclosed revelations, The Murdoch Archipelago is the most up-to-date and definitive survey of Murdoch’s life and times; how power flows from influence; and whether this should (or if it can) be regulated.
Discover all about our incredible world and how to look after it.
From the deepest oceans to fiery deserts, tropical jungles to icy mountains, it lets you explore and get close to the places or ‘biomes’ that make our world so special. Read it together and you’ll find out how life on Earth began, and see the effect humankind has had on the natural world.
Amazing photographs taken from space show how the Earth is changing, and what each of us can do to help preserve its fragile wonder. From recycling our bottles to making space for nature, there are tips, ideas, and website links on all the practical, positive things your child can do to help ensure our Earth stays amazing for a very long time to come. A great introduction to our planet in all its glory, with an inspiring foreword by eco adventurer David de Rothschild.
When a storm sweeps through the country, Asa wakes up the next day to find that his town is almost unrecognisable – trees have fallen down, roofs have collapsed and debris lies everywhere. But amongst the debris in his back garden Asa makes an astounding discovery – the body of a small winged creature. A creature that looks very like a fairy. Do fairies really exist? Asa embarks on a mission to find out. A mission that leads him to the lost journals of local eccentric Benjamin Tooth who, two hundred years earlier, claimed to have discovered the existence of fairies. What Asa reads in those journals takes him on a secret trip to Windvale Moor, where he discovers much more than he’d hoped to…
An enchanting debut from actor Mackenzie Crook, star of The Office and Pirates of the Caribbean.
“[A] charming, finely produced little treasure, told with clarity, wit and lightness.” Sunday Times
This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin’s poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkin’s typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinised afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkin’s typescripts and the early printings are recorded. For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poet’s comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnett’s commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.
The Rivered Earth contains four libretti written by Vikram Seth to be set to music by Alec Roth – together with an account of the pleasures and pains of working with a composer. Entitled Songs in Time of War, Shared Ground, The Traveller and Seven Elements, they take us all over the world – from Chinese and Indian poetry to the beauty and quietness of the Salisbury house where the poet George Herbert lived and died.
Spanning centuries of creativity and humanity, these poems pulse with life, energy and inspired brilliance. They are accompanied by four pieces of calligraphy by the author.
“Such writing reminds us that there are secrets beyond technique, beyond style, which have to do with a quality of soul on the part of the writer, a giving of oneself.” Guardian
Equally gifted as a poet, essayist, memoirist, travel writer and novelist, Vikram Seth is perhaps best-known for the phenomenal A Suitable Boy, one of the best-loved, most widely-read and indeed longest novels of recent times. He is currently working on a sequel to the novel, entitled A Suitable Girl, to be published in 2013.
Saturday, March 24th 2012 at 11:00 AM
What is better than a story that makes you laugh out loud, the kind that makes you giggle a bit and feel silly?
Today we are reading funny stories that will (hopefully!) make you laugh and giggle and feel a bit silly.
Thursday, March 22nd 2012 at 5:30 PM
Thursday, March 22nd 2012 at 1:29 PM
Another pre-order special for you – this time on A Song of Ice & Fire Book 5 by George RR Martin:
In May, both volumes of Book 5 (Dance of Dragons) of A Song of Ice & Fire by George RR Martin are being released.
Of these, Volume 1 (Dreams & Dust) was previously available as a Hardback at R300, but both the paperback of this, and the brand new Volume 2 (After the Feast) are being simultaneously released as paperbacks at R150. At the same time, there is also a boxed set comprising Books 1-4 available, at R600.
The special offer is as follows:
- EITHER volumes 1 OR 2 – 10% discount
- BOTH volumes 1 AND 2 – 15% discount on both
- BOTH volumes 1 AND 2 AND the boxset – 20% on all 3!
Please let us know if you are interested in this – this offer is only valid on pre-orders which are paid in full by the release date of the book in May.
We are very happy to take payment by credit card telephonically, or to send invoices with our banking details, should you prefer to pay electronically.
Please contact us to enquire!
Tuesday, March 20th 2012 at 5:30 PM
Looking for Trouble is a collection of short stories set in Yeoville from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The stories capture with a dark humour the lives of young people trying to make a go of things, given the constraints of the country and the volatile period. Most of the stories have been published in literary magazines or in collections both here, the UK and in Uganda.
Praise from Henrietta Rose-Innes (Author of Shark’s Egg, Homing, Nineveh, and Caine Prize Winner)
These wry, subtle stories are deceptively simple, completely compelling. Brave, evocative writing that takes you back to the intense milieu of 80s Yeoville, and to all the bittersweet sexual questing of youth.
Praise from Rachel Zadok (Author of Gem Squash Tokoloshe)
“These stories awakened in me a sense of nostalgia, not only for Yeoville in the early nineties, but for being young, love’s fool and sexually reckless. At some point, experience forces us to lose our illusions and come of age, damaged by love but wiser. This spot-on collection captures that arc of life and, as I turned the last page, I felt we had lived well, if imperfectly.”
Colleen will be in conversation with Caine Prize shortlisted Lauri Kubuitsile.
Published by Modjaji.
