English
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Hide and seek
2014-02-04"Hiding without a soul
unidentifiable
leaving not a breadcrumb
typing as a dumb
amplifying its thoughts
mostly on politics, religion and its Gods
The hiding troll with no soul"
Stargazer
2014-01-28"She looked up, nightly
She looked through the crystal stars
Those gossiping stars
Not giving them any attention
She looked past them, seeing only her pain
Reflected back."
The loud silence
2014-01-28"An unexpressed, swallowed roar
The confluence of a rushing water flow
Suffocated breath"
Bloody Satisfied – edited by Joanne Hichens
2014-01-24 “Five years later, in 2013, Hichens has once again edited and collected various storytelling voices under the title Bloody Satisfied: short.sharp.stories. The collection is the inaugural anthology produced in conjunction with the National Arts Festival. Will you be bloody satisfied after reading these stories?”
Lemon people
2014-01-21"I crouch next to her. It smells like moss and lemon verbena. I run my finger over the lemon man. He has freckles from the dust."
Safely saved
2014-01-21"In this age when sharpening a pencil has become abrasive and taking up a chisel is absurd we choose to donate our fantasies and ideologies, our conspiracies and our poetry to electronic memories."
South African Flowering Trees: Photos of book launch at Kirstenbosch
2014-01-20 The aptly named Rob Wood, author of South African Flowering Trees, was represented by his son Alan and grandson Aden at the launch of his book at Kirstenbosch this week.
Taleswapper's Donny Truter off to Nashville (if his girl likes it)
2014-01-20 "Without creative or pioneering thought we cannot evolve, we cannot break the boundaries of the ever imminent plague of the mundane and normalcy. We must go see live music. We must pay to get in if there is a cover charge and see the product of our fellow human."
South African Flowering Trees – A botanical adventure through history
2014-01-14 Many books have been written about trees, but South African Flowering Trees – a botanical adventure through history makes a good effort at giving a complete picture.
Song for Aung (For Aung San Suu Kyi)
2014-01-10 "An ill-defined oasiswithin which freedom
finds an identity,
shape,
hue,
texture,
language."
Truth dies
2014-01-10 "Truth diesat the doorstep of fragmented "truths",
and the jostle for supremacy
becomes the norm."
The human species
2014-01-10"We entered this solid plane like asteroids
on a mission to kill without thought
So we domesticated the buffalo for an easy
merciful cut
befriended wolves to help us sniff rabbits ou"
What Hidden Lies: Crime from up close
2014-01-10 "In Greek mythology, Persephone is the queen of the underworld. In the brilliant debut novel by celebrated scriptwriter and script editor Michelle Rowe, detective Persephone (Persy) Jonas ... is the plucky young woman tasked with navigating the underworld of a community where little is as it appears."
Calm
2014-01-10"One small drop of this quiet
Falling from the dappled shade, carried by the breeze"
The crisis of immoral academics
2014-01-06 “In Jean-Paul Sartre’s epistolary novel Nausea, the novel’s misanthropic protagonist Roquentin regards the existence around him in the French ville where he lives. Sitting under a chestnut tree, he becomes enraged at the ‘monstrous lumps of gross, absurd being’ that surround him. ‘Filth!’ he shouts. ‘What rotten filth!’”
The Spiral House by Claire Robertson
2014-01-03 “Claire Robertson’s extensively researched debut novel, The Spiral House, comes after thirty years spent working as a journalist. The novel has garnered praise from various quarters, unsurprisingly, since it seems to engage every nerve and fibre of one’s body and mind, so absorbing is its arc.”
Reader's review: Black Widow Society
2014-01-03 "If anyone dared to say that the burgeoning South African crime fiction scene was light on inventiveness, over-politicised, almost exclusively cornered by Cape writers and lacking in contributions from black female writers, then Angela Makholwa offers a decidedly tart response with her latest novel, Black Widow Society."
African Library: Harare North by Brian Chikwava
2013-12-18 Chikwava’s Harare North ... presents readers with an evocation of conflicted Zimbabwean identities ... and with making lives for themselves in Britain, where so many of their compatriots have inserted themselves ... (T)hey have mockingly re-named London 'Harare North' (Johannesburg being known as 'Harare South')."
Tin Soldier at the Artscape
2013-12-11 It is always a challenge to tell a story through dance - the dancers use movement, mime and music to tell the story - but being a very simple story, that was quite easy to translate into dance.” Robin van Wyk discusses the choreography of a classic ballet this holiday season in Cape Town.
Whimsical generator
2013-12-04"You and I have a complicated relationship
Like a long unbalanced equation
Requiring a clear mind, in the heat-fatigued night"