Many scholars have been arguing for some time that dominant knowledge and discourses on the African city are largely inappropriate. These discourses mirror simplistic modernist assumptions about what constitutes a viable, efficient and competitive city. From such a vantage point the African city can only be seen and read as a narrative about absence, failure and inadequacy.
Critics of these dominant discourses, such as Jennifer Robinson, AbdouMaliq Simone, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Asef Bayat, Ibrahim Abdullah, Okwui Enwezor, Onookome Okome, Jean Tshonda, Philip de Boeck, Sarah Nuttall, amongst many others, point to multiple alternatives in approaching and understanding the African city.

The unique ambition of Rogue Urbanism is to produce new and relevant theoretical work on African urbanism in a way that works within the border zone between inherited theoretical resources and artistic representations of everyday practices and  phenomenology in African cities. The assumption is that urban theorists can renew and expand their search for grounded approaches to theorise African urbanism through an engagement with the epistemologies of artists, cultural practitioners and designers; and theorists who work on the urban condition and spatiality can find new entry points to enrich their own creative processes. Where reflections fail to work directly with the insights of artists, scholars can at least work through their understanding of the ordinary in the everyday, however this may manifest or inspire.
The hope of the editors is that Rogue Urbanism will provoke the passion of others to further enlarge and deepen the search for the rogue intensities that mark African cities as they find their voice and footing in a truly unwieldy world. Rogue Urbanism is both a call and a response, in hope of better understanding.

We are offering a 20% discount on all orders received and paid for before the publication date of May 25th.
Published price is R650, but you can get it for R520.
To take advantage of the offer please mail us on booklounge@gmail.com, or visit us in-store.

Published by Jacana Media.

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The girl who wouldn’t die, hunting a killer who shouldn’t exist…

A terrifying and original serial-killer thriller from award-winning author, Lauren Beukes.

1930’s America: Lee Curtis Harper is a delusional, violent drifter who stumbles on a house that opens onto other times.

Driven by visions, he begins a killing spree over the next 60 years, using an undetectable MO and leaving anachronistic clues on his victims’ bodies.

But when one of his intended ‘shining girls’, Kirby Mazrachi, survives a brutal stabbing, she becomes determined to unravel the mystery behind her would-be killer. While the authorities are trying to discredit her, Kirby is getting closer to the truth, as Harper returns again and again…

There are 2 pre-orders available:

Paperback edition: R162 (retail price R180)

Hardback Limited Collectors Edition: R261 (retail price R290)

The books will be signed by Lauren, and she is happy to personalise/dedicate the books as required.

To order just mail us on booklounge@gmail.com, stating which edition you would like, and we will send you an invoice. In order to qualify for the discount, books must be paid for before the publication date of 15th April.

Published by Random House

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Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday – in evolutionary time – when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.

The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerising first-hand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years – a past that has mostly vanished – and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today.
This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticise traditional societies – after all, we are shocked by some of their practices – but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful reading.

We are offering 20% off all pre-publication orders as follows:

Paperback: Published price R215, special price R172

Hardback: Published price R350, special price R280

Offer valid until January 15^th 2013. Published by Penguin Books.

To take advantage of any of these special offers just email us on booklounge@gmail.com and we will mail you an invoice. Or you can pay in-store or over the phone.

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From the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book on how to benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and his revelatory new book Antifragile offers a definitive solution: how to live in a world that is unpredicatable, chaotic, and full of shocks, and how to thrive during periods of disaster. Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. For what Taleb calls the ‘antifragile’ is beyond the merely robust; it benefits from shocks, uncertainty and stressors. Antifragile is about what to do when we don’t understand. It is a new word because it is a new concept.

Many of the greatest breakthroughs in human endeavour come from the innovation by trial and error that is part of antifragility. And some of the best systems we know of, including natural selection and evolution, have antifragility at their heart. How did the disaster of the sinking of the Titanic bring us closer to safety? Why does the stress on bones make us stronger? Why should you write a resignation letter on your first day in the office? Why should we detest the lack of accountability at the heart of capitalism?

The most successful of us, the most daring and creative will take advantage of disorder and invent new, more powerful opportunities and advantages beyond our expectations.

Irreverent and ambitious, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to live-and thrive-in a world we don’t understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to predict. Taleb’s message is revolutionary: what is not antifragile will surely perish.

We are offering 20% off all pre-publication orders. The published price will be R225, but we are offering it for just R180. Published by Penguin Books. Please note that the book is due in December, but does not have a specific date yet, so cannot be guaranteed for Christmas. We will keep you informed as we are updated.

To take advantage of this offer, please contact us on 021 462 2425 or booklounge@gmail.com

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Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart, is a writer whose moral courage and storytelling gifts have left an enduring stamp on world literature. There Was a Country is his long-awaited account of coming of age during the defining experience of his life: the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War of 1967-1970. It became infamous around the world for its impact on the Biafrans, who were starved to death by the Nigerian government in one of the twentieth century’s greatest humanitarian disasters.
Caught up in the atrocities were Chinua Achebe and his young family. Achebe, already a world-renowned novelist, served his Biafran homeland as a roving cultural ambassador, witnessing the war’s full horror first-hand. Immediately after the war, he took an academic post in the United States, and for over forty years he has maintained a considered silence on those terrible years, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Now, years in the making, comes his towering reckoning with one of modern Africa’s most fateful experiences, both as he lived it and he has now come to understand it.
Marrying history and memoir, with the author’s poetry woven throughout, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid observation and considered research and reflection. It relates Nigeria’s birth pangs in the context of Achebe’s own development as a man and a writer, and examines the role of the artist in times of war.
Publication price is R280, but we are offering a pre-publication price of R224

Published by Penguin.

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During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported ‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.’ Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing his voice. Mortality is the most meditative piece of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.
Publication price is R185, but we are offering a pre-publication price of R148.

Published by Penguin.

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On 14 February 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been ‘sentenced to death’ by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being ‘against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran’.

So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov – Joseph Anton.

How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for over nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.

It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.

We are offering 20% off all pre-orders received before the 17 September publication date. The published price will be R295, but we are offering it for just R236. Please mail us on booklounge@gmail.com, and we will send an invoice.

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Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are the men behind the bestselling Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Their chain of restaurants is famous for its innovative flavours, stylish design and superb cooking.

At the heart of Yotam and Sami’s food is a shared home city: Jerusalem. Both were born there in the same year, Sami on the Arab east side and Yotam in the Jewish west. Nearly 30 years later they met in London, and discovered they shared a language, a history, and a love of great food.

Jerusalem sets 120 of Yotam and Sami’s inspired, accessible recipes within the cultural and religious melting pot of this diverse city. With culinary influences coming from its Muslim, Jewish, Arab, Christian and Armenian communities and with a Mediterranean climate, the range of ingredients and styles is stunning. From soups (spicy frikkeh soup with meatballs), meat and fish (chicken with caramelized onion and cardamom rice, sea bream with harissa and rose), vegetables and salads (spicy beetroot, leek and walnut salad), pulses and grains (saffron rice with barberries and pistachios), to cakes and desserts (clementine and almond syrup cake), there is something new for everyone to discover.

Packed with beautiful food and gorgeous photography, Jerusalem showcases sumptuous Ottolenghi dishes in a dazzling setting.

We are offering 20% off all pre-orders received before the September publication date. The published price will be R415, but we are offering it for just R332. Please mail us on booklounge@gmail.com, and we will send an invoice.

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