Litnet

"Somewhat darker and less fanciful than Lady limbo (although the same delightfully eccentric characters people its pages), Wolf trap takes Paola from a twisted Wonderland to a far more sobering reality (there are sly allusions to Through the looking-glass, and what Alice found there)." 

"I write every day, all day. I stop at five pm for a couple of hours to walk the dogs. I don’t write down ideas for new projects. The good ones tend to stick; the others go to the great idea landfill in the sky."

"Really looking forward to some of the interactions between international and local writers, for example, Master Manipulators at 6:00 pm on Wednesday evening, featuring acclaimed British crime writer Ali Land, Norwegian Carl Frode Tiller and the exciting local debut novelist Chwayita Ngamlana."

"Love is everything. It is the most precious thing that we are capable of as humans."

The seventh Open Book Festival will take place from 6 to 10 September at The Fugard Theatre, District Six Homecoming Centre, A4 Arts Foundation, PH Centre, Central Library Cape Town, Elsies River Library, Kuyasa Library and The Book Lounge from 10:00 to 21:00 each day. 

"This important narrative, like other well-known, earlier examples of African prison memoirs, many of them by famous writers, is a record of courage, friendship and enterprise in loyal league against the incarcerating, isolating and obliterating forces of tyranny."

"Our latest book, Road tripper Eastern Cape Karoo, is what you will not find on Google about the people, the lifestyles, the snippets of history and the best hang-outs for travellers in this magical region."

"I came from a walking and hiking family, so it’s a fairly natural activity for me. Walking gives you an interesting perspective into human time. I like its sense of scale and the activity’s meditativeness."

The 9th Jozi Book Fair takes place from 31 August to 3 September in Johannesburg. The theme is Women and literature.

"Kalim Rajab’s collection is a readable and even-handed account of Harry Oppenheimer as a reticent philosopher-capitalist, leading readers to view him within the limits and possibilities of his time, and to appreciate in hindsight the flawed nature of his legacy."

Schalk van der Merwe's On Record – Popular Afrikaans Music & Society, 1900–2017 was launched on Tuesday, 15 August in Stellenbosch.

"Annas has taken some pretty evident elements of the South African reality and mixed them into a breath-stopping brew: a wall, some 'intruders', a tinderbox socio-political milieu and a few overinflated egos that concern themselves almost exclusively with obsessively safeguarding the privilege contained within the wall."

"The story as a whole is set so far in the future, yet is so grounded in our connection to the primitive and natural world, that it conveys the same type of timeless appeal as Game of Thrones (although the latter’s genre is fantasy). For this reason, we can forgive the sometimes hackneyed feeling of the poems."

"... De Kock, it seems to me, gets much right in Losing the plot. His preoccupations seem all the more relevant as we try to untangle the dense web of corruption in South Africa, decipher the shifty nonsense emerging from the White House, hope to differentiate news from fake news, and find ways of living in a murky world in which states have become indistinguishable from criminal enterprises and politicians from racketeers."

"I came to this book interested in inter-/transgenerational trauma, as a South African, and read it as a case study of the Afrikaner as a particular case of such trauma. I left unconvinced, which is a pity." 

Following the enormous success of the collaboration between Poetica and #cocreateSA last year, #cocreatePOETICA will once again be part of the seventh Open Book Festival from 6 to 10 September 2017.

Comic Fest will take place on 9 September from 09:30 to 18:00 and on 10 September from 09:30 to 17:00 as part of the Open Book Festival 2017.

You are invited to the launch of The twinkling of an eye on 15 August in Cape Town. Author Sue Brown will be in conversation with Karina Szczurek.

“I think effective fiction writing stems from some personal disturbance ​that the author extrapolates into another very different imaginative scenario. This means that the emotional experience of the writing feels authentic, and that the author can explore her dilemmas outside the confines of her own life.”

You are invited to the launch of Delilah now trending on 19 August in Stellenbosch. Author Pamela Power will be in conversation with Karin Brynard.