From the underworld of zama-zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town Zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are often more far-fetched, and more compelling, than any fiction.Featuring J. M. Coetzee • Kimon de Greef • William Dicey • Alexandra Dodd • Madeleine Fullar...

1986 was a pivotal year in South African history. It was the year of the vigilante, the year of the necklace – but also the year the talking began.Drawing on newspaper articles, memoirs, and little-known histories, William Dicey presents a compelling diary of a very bad year.He focuses on ordinary people, showing what life was actually like under an authoritarian regime – from the six hours a day that black workers in KwaNdebele spent on buses to the rebel sporting tours th...

From a carcass competition in the Karoo to a shambolic murder trial in Cape Town, William Dicey’s essays freewheel across an open terrain of interests. Dicey is curious and inventive, weaving strands of essay, journalism, fiction and self-reportage into something uniquely his own.Mongrel investigates a range of topics – radical environmentalism, the fault lines between farmer and farm worker, the joys and sorrows of reading – yet drifts of concern and sensibility draw the collectio...

Musings from a truly original thinker on eveything under the sun and many things over the moon.There are few aspects of existence to which Michael Leunig has not turned his renaissance mind, as a bemused and committed member of the human plight. From his cartoonist's sensibilities comes a peculiar journalism made of parable, memoir and soliloquy, on subjects ranging from the sublime to the subhuman.From the fragile ecosystem of the spirit to the brutalisation of th...

Celebrated writers reveal surprising truths about the joys, challenges, and importance of finding the words, in this special fundraising anthology for PEN Canada.In Finding the Words, thirty-one well-known writers share deeply personal discoveries and stories that will surprise, delight, and stir the mind and heart. By turns inspiring, provocative, witty, and compelling, these diverse and original pieces explore home, exile, and the search for a place to belong; co...

Irreverent, laugh-out-loud tales of living and travelling in India.

Masterly new fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureA startling new work: 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 recalls her youthful surreptitious sexual initiation, while she and her parents chauffeured ...

A strange, thrilling novel about desperate love, paranoia, and heartbreak by one of America's most singular writers.“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington...

'I don't think I've seen a more impressive collection of Australian writers in a single book.' Stephen Romei, The AustralianOne of the central moral issues of our time is the question of asylum seekers, arguably the most controversial subject in Australia today. In this landmark anthology, twenty-seven of Australia's finest writers have focused their intelligence and creativity on the theme of the dispossessed, bringing a whole new perspective of depth and ...

Looking back on a long and active life, Anne Deveson draws on a rich vein of public and private experiences to reflect on what made her the bold social commentator she became. Central among her lifelong preoccupations have been the questioning of war, and the promotion of peace.Deveson describes her childhood during the Second World War in Britain, which prompted her family's evacuation to Malaya just before invasion by the Japanese, and further evacuation to Australia as refugees ...

Winner of the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction,The Age Book of the Year Award for Non-fiction, The Dobbie Prize for Best First Book.A lyrical memoir from a first-time author that has won critical acclaim Australia-wide. In the tradition of Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy, Mahood offers an intense and sensitive exploration of identity, familial ties and black/white relations in Australia.Craft For A Dry Lake is ...

In To the Barricades we move back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. At once elegy (poems dedicated “to” past revolutionary figures and scenes) and a call for renewed struggle in the here and now, this collection of “social lyrics” and serial explosions seeks to drive apathy from the fi...