Litnet

You are invited to the Cape Town launch of Cult Sister by Lesley Smailes on 18 April 2017, where she will be in conversation with Shado Twala.

"Cult sister is my memoir of the ten years I spent travelling around America with a nomadic, very fundamental Christian group. I try to paint an honest word picture about life in the strange group from my point of view."

"At the heart of this absorbing portrait – within a ribcage that contains much else – lies the enigmatic contradiction of Smuts, a revolving mask that his latest biographer does a good job of lifting."

"How to open the door and Flame and song are books about 'being in the world and not defeated by it'. In both, it is often that which is not said that is delivering the strongest punches."

Breaking news: "We have lodged our formal announcement with Unesco that Durban is going to bid to become South Africa’s and Africa’s first Unesco City of Literature." Read it first on LitNet.

"As a woman of her time, as an Afrikaans person of her time, and even as an MP of her time, she never bent with the breeze – she was 'what the willow does to the wind'."

Ralph Mathekga in conversation with Theuns Eloff at the launch of Turning point.

"Sheila Kohler’s tender, searing autobiographical memoir is emotionally and technically intelligent, shaped by a sense of the dangers of self-regard."

An invitation to the launch of Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog, a collection of poetry now available in English.

The launch of Business Writing for South Africans will take place in Melville on 16 March 2017. Writers Bittie Viljoen-Smook, Johan Geldenhuys and Wena Coetzee will be there to discuss their book.

"Sometimes seen as primarily a family saga or a portrait of the teeming city of Cairo, this debut novel’s wider resonance is indicated in the subtitle; it is a highly sophisticated reading of the pulse of urban Egypt over a stretch of the 30 years between 1984 and 2014."

"Stanzas is a vibrant and vital contribution to the local poetry scene. Any reader’s soul will delight in a subscription to the quarterly, which I can wholeheartedly recommend."

"You can eat very affordable vegetables and animal proteins with their existing fat very inexpensively."

A feast of literary offerings from Africa and the world will be showcased at this year’s 20th Time of the Writer International Festival. The Festival, set to take place from 13–18 March 2017, will feature some of the country’s most prolific writers.

The launch of Tribing and Untribing the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, takes place on 2 March 2017 at the University of the Witwatersrand.

“The choice of the title is to do with the water connection in the narrative, as well as the emotional state that all the characters are in. It is a limbo of pain and circumstance, a place of entrapment.”

"Ralph Goldswain, in his work on Jeremiah Goldswain in The chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain (2014), and now in Roughing it, has made a considerable contribution to South African settler historiography."

"If Dudley was never meant to wave the magical fairy wand, to turn Nasson from a self-confessed numerical and scientific dunce into an Einstein, then he definitely succeeded in inspiring him to become a formidable historian. History matters is scientific proof!"

“Lucy’s Dream is an engaging children’s story that reveals slices of life of a little girl living in the fishing community in Simon’s Town up until the 1960s.”

"In the same way that we have Australian English, American English, and so on, we have South African English. Obviously all of these Englishes have a lot in common with British English, but they also have many unique aspects."