Archive for the ‘Short Stories’ Category
by Lindsay on May 16th, 2012
Verdict: carrot
The premise of the South African writer Ivan Vladislavic’s genre-blending collection The Loss Library sounds fairly simple at first – to write a personal book about the stories he could not write, with thoughts on what prevented him.
In theory, this book would be perhaps 50 per cent creative non-fiction, an autobiographical look back through old notebooks that form, among other things, a chronicle of the writer’s past ambitions. Fiction could be included by giving readers snippets of the unfinished stories, which Vladislavic does, and if the book sheds new light on the modern writer’s craft and avoids looking like a bunch of old fragments published for fun or profit, it might yield good results.
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by Lindsay on May 11th, 2012
Kenyan author Billy Kahora has been shortlisted for the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Urban Zoning”, published in Vol. 37 of McSweeney’s. Kahora is up against Nigeria’s Rotimi Babatunde, Malawi’s Stanley Kenani, Zimbabwe’s Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and South Africa’s Constance Myburgh for the £10 000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 2 July. Last week we featured shortlisted story, Babatunde’s “Bombay Republic”.
While you await the announcement of the award, we invite you to read “Urban Zoning”:
Outside on Tom Mboya Street, Kandle realized that he was truly in the Zone. The Zone was the calm, breathless place he found himself in after drinking for a minimum of three days straight. He had slept for less than fifteen hours, in strategic naps, had eaten just enough to avoid going crazy, and had drunk enough water to make a cow go belly-up. The two-hour baths of Hell’s Gate
hot-spring heat had also helped.
Kandle had discovered the Zone when he was seventeen. He had swapped vices by taking up alcohol after the pleasures of casual sex had waned. In a city–village rumor circuit full of outlandish tales of ministers’ sons who drove Benzes with trunks full of cash, of a character called Jimmy X who was unbeaten in about five hundred bar fights going back to the late ’80s; in a place where sixty-year-old tycoons bedded teenagers and kept their panties as souvenirs; in a town where the daughter of one of Kenya’s richest businessmen held parties that were so exclusive that Janet Jackson had flown down for her birthday—Kandle, self-styled master of The Art of Seventy-Two-Hour Drinking, had achieved a footnote.
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Photo courtesy the Caine Prize
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by Sophy on May 9th, 2012
Verdict: carrots all round!
Sally Fink reviews Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes:
Nineveh is a window into the life of pest controller Katya Grubbs, a woman following in the footsteps of her estranged father. But unlike her father, who used rather unscrupulous means of dealing with people’s unwanted problems, Katya chooses the painless approach. Yet despite her attempts to be her own woman, echoes of her father’s methods sometimes creep into her own, such as the unethical practice of “insurance” which entails leaving a pest or two behind in order to ensure repeat business.
The story begins when Katya is offered the opportunity to work at Nineveh, a new housing development stuck in hiatus because of a strange beetle infestation. Katya’s life is also in hiatus, and Nineveh offers a change, the temptation of the life of quiet luxury she yearns for. She can’t resist. But there is a fly in the ointment. The name Grubbs is familiar to the owner, and Katya discovers that her father was initially contracted for the job, and the relationship ended badly.
Maya Fowler reviews The Big Stick by Richard de Nooy:
“Fear is the problem,” says Wynand Greefswald, (fictional) former SADF aversion therapist, of the protagonist Staal, and the homosexuality of which he was trying to cure the boy with the blessing of his family. His words are echoed throughout the novel in a chorus of voices, including Staal’s step-brother Wessel, who tells us that it was fear that indeed killed the young man. It as the novel progresses and the reader gets to inhabit Staal’s world, however, that the boundaries shift between who is fearful and who fearless.
It is with fear in her heart, certainly, that Alma Nel, mother of Staal – provincial, unsophisticated, ignorant and deeply conservative – arrives in Amsterdam to retrieve the body of her son, who has died under mysterious circumstances. The son she sent away from home somewhere between the time he finished school and was due to be drafted for military service. It was after the visit to Barry’s Men’s Wear – the final test – and somewhat longer after the aversion therapy ([w]ith electric shocks, yes, p. 41) bestowed on the schoolboy as a family favour. It was the mid-80s.
Karina Magdalena Szczurek reviews The Loss Library by Ivan Vladislavic:
Ivan Vladislavić is one of South Africa’s finest contemporary writers. His latest offering is a most unusual book about some of the most unusual stories: those which have never seen the light of a published page, at least not in their initially intended form.
The Loss Library comprises of eleven “case studies” of “unsettled accounts” from “three distinct periods”. The first is the time of the transition between 1989 and 1992 when Vladislavić, like most authors in the country, felt more like a historian than a writer. The second and third periods, the years between 1996-99 and 2004-05, are characterised by Vladislavić’s fascination with the act of documentation itself: “They feature libraries, research papers and dictionaries, and the means to read and write – or not to read and write – books.”
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by Sophy on May 4th, 2012
Nigerian author Rotimi Babatunde has been shortlisted for the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story “Bombay’s Republic”, published in Vol. 3.9 of the Mirabilia Review. Babatunde is up against Kenya’s Billy Kahora, Malawi’s Stanley Kenani, Zimbabwe’s Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and South Africa’s Constance Myburgh for the £10 000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 2 July.
While you await the announcement of the award, we invite you to read the shortlisted stories, beginning with “Bombay’s Republic”:
The old jailhouse on the hilltop had remained uninhabited for many decades, through the construction of the town’s first grammar school and the beginning of house-to-house harassment from the affliction called sanitary inspectors, through the laying of the railway tracks by navvies who likewise succeeded in laying pregnancies in the bellies of several lovestruck girls, but fortunes changed for the building with the return of Colour Sergeant Bombay, the veteran who went off with the recruitment officers to Hitler’s War as a man and came back a spotted leopard.
Before Bombay’s departure when everything in the world was locked in its individual box, he could not have believed such metamorphosis was possible. A man was still a man and a leopard a leopard while the old jailhouse was a forsaken place not fit for human habitation. A white man was the District Officer who went by in an impressive white jacket and a black man was the Native Police constable who saluted as the white man passed. This was how the world was and there was no reason to think it could be otherwise. But the war came and the bombs started falling, shattering things out of their imprisonment in boxes and jumbling them without logic into a protean mishmash. Without warning, everything became possible.
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Photo courtesy the Caine Prize for African Writing
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by Sophy on May 1st, 2012
Alert! The shortlist for the Thirteenth Caine Prize for African Writing has just been announced. The winner of the £10 000 prize, currently held by Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo, will be announced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on Monday 2 July.
BOOK LIVE sends its congratulations to the shortlistees, as follows:
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Press release:
The shortlist for the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced today (Tuesday 1 May) by Ben Okri OBE, the new Vice President of the Prize.
The Chair of judges, author and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Bernardine Evaristo MBE, has described the shortlist as “truly diverse fiction from a truly diverse continent.”
The Caine Prize, Africa’s leading literary award, is now in its thirteenth year. Involved from the beginning, Ben Okri, the internationally acclaimed Nigerian writer was announced as the Vice President of the Prize last week (26 April 2012). Ellah Allfrey OBE, deputy Editor of Granta magazine is the new Deputy Chair.
The 2012 shortlist comprises:
- Rotimi Babatunde (Nigeria) ‘Bombay’s Republic’ from ‘Mirabilia Review’ Vol. 3.9 (Lagos, 2011) http://mirabilia.webs.com/
- Billy Kahora (Kenya) ‘Urban Zoning’ from ‘McSweeney’s’ Vol. 37 (San Francisco, 2011) www.mcsweeneys.net
- Stanley Kenani (Malawi) ‘Love on Trial’ from ‘For Honour and Other Stories’ published by eKhaya/Random House Struik (Cape Town, 2011) www.randomstruik.co.za
- Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe) ‘La Salle de Départ’ from ‘Prick of the Spindle’ Vol. 4.2 (New Orleans, June, 2010) www.prickofthespindle.com
- Constance Myburgh (South Africa) ‘Hunter Emmanuel’ from ‘Jungle Jim’ Issue 6, (Cape Town, 2011) www.junglejim.org
In her first year as Caine Prize Administrator Lizzy Attree stated, “this year’s shortlist represents the best of short African fiction published worldwide. I’m looking forward to working with Ben Okri and Ellah Allfrey to continue to establish the Caine Prize as the mark of excellence in African literature.”
Selected from 122 entries from 14 African countries Bernardine Evaristo said, “I’m proud to announce that this shortlist shows the range of African fiction beyond the more stereotypical narratives. These stories have an originality and facility with language that made them stand out. We’ve chosen a bravely provocative homosexual story set in Malawi; a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma Campaign of WW2; a hardboiled noir tale involving a disembodied leg; a drunk young Kenyan who outwits his irate employers; and the tension between Senegalese siblings over migration and family responsibility.”
The winner of the £10,000 prize is to be announced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on Monday 2 July.
Ends
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Images courtesy Guernica and Caine Prize
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by Carolyn on Apr 26th, 2012
Uitspraak: wortel
Plante kan praat, Jeanne Goosen se jongste kortverhaalbundel, het in 2010 by Kwela Boeke verskyn. En kort daarná op my boekrak. Hiermee enkele gedagtes oor verhale uit hierdie bundel wat my bygebly het:
Die kortverhaal “Lemoene” is ’n hoogtepunt. Dit vertel die verhaal van Natie Barnard en sy Duitse vrou Inge. Die verwydering en gevolglike verwyt tussen hierdie twee karakters word deur die loop van die verhaal treffend belig. Inge is uiters verbitterd en onvergenoegd. Haar hunkering na meer lewensbetekenis lei tot ’n godsdiensywer wat haar verder van haar man vervreem.
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by Carolyn on Apr 26th, 2012
“Deur verhale verstaan ons traumatiese dinge wat met ons gebeur het. Dit genees ons en dit gee vir ander mense insig.” Om hierdie rede het Jeanette Ferreira ‘n bundel met verhale oor die Grensoorlog saamgestel.
In die video hieronder, wat Volksblad by die bekendstelling van die bundel Grensoorlogstories in Bloemfontein opgeneem het, sê Ferreira dat baie van die verhale in die bundel die wonde weerspieël van mense wat nog nie die oorlog verwerk het nie, al is dit al meer as 20 jaar verby.
Daar is ook humoristiese verhale in die boek, “want om te lag oor dinge wat seer is, is ‘n beproefde manier om traumatiese ervaringe te hanteer”.
Die bundel word deur Litera Publikasies uitgegee en sluit 31 verhale deur onder andere Christiaan Bakkes, Johan bakkes, Douwleen Bredenhann, Helene de Kock, Jaco Fouché, Maretha Maartens, Bernard Odendaal, Deon Opperman, Theresa Papenfus, Gerda Taljaard, Hennie van Coller en Fanie Viljoen in.
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by Carolyn on Apr 24th, 2012
Uitspraak: wortels
Betower laat die werklikheid soos ’n sprokiesverhaal voel.
Die boek begin stadig, maar maak jou nuuskierig genoeg om verder te lees. Dit speel hoofsaaklik af in ’n groot bos net buite ’n klein dorpie in die Magoebaskloof.
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by Sophy on Apr 22nd, 2012
Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz is set to release a brand new collection of short stories, his second, in September this year. The highly anticipated release of This Is How You Lose Her will mark more 15 years since the publication of his first collection, Drown, and five since the release of his bestselling The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The latest issue of The New Yorker contains one of Díaz’s as-yet-unpublished short stories, which will most likely appear in the forthcoming collection. Read “Miss Lora” and a Q&A with Díaz below:
Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.
You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.
And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.
Your brother. Dead from the cancer, and sometimes you still felt a fulgurating sadness over it, even though he really was a super asshole at the end. He didn’t die easy at all. Those last months, he just steady kept trying to run away. He’d be caught trying to hail a cab outside Beth Israel or walking down some Newark street in his greens. Once he conned an ex-girlfriend into driving him to California, but outside of Camden he started having convulsions and she called you in a panic. Was it some atavistic impulse to die alone, out of sight? Or was he just trying to fulfill something that had always been inside him? Why do you keep doing that? you asked, but he just laughed. Doing what?
This week’s story, “Miss Lora,” marks the return of Yunior, who last appeared in the magazine two years ago, in “The Pura Principle.” In that story, Yunior’s brother, Rafa, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. “Miss Lora” takes place shortly after Rafa’s death, when Yunior is still dealing with “a fulgurating sadness” and also sleeping with his neighbor, an older woman. Back in 2010, did you know that you were going to write this story?
My brother’s cancer—what I used to call his exile to Cancer Planet—it’s one of those fractures in my past that I keep returning to. Very boring for readers, I’m sure, but all artists have their chronotopes, these time-spaces we keep circling, and this happens to be mine. But yes, I knew I would write “Miss Lora.” Actually, I tried to write this story first but it just wouldn’t stick, and so then I wrote “The Pura Principle.” What really sparked me was that I was hanging with a group of my boys, they asked me what I was working on, and I told them—this older-woman thing—and a few of them started talking about their own experiences in high school. Two of them had been in similar situations, even lost their virginities to older women. They were proud of what happened, too, a serious notch in their masculine belts. This type of impropriety was not as uncommon as one might imagine, not in a Caribbean community like the one I grew up in, where boys were encouraged toward a hypermasculine ideal, where the line between adults and minors was not as safeguarded as it should have been. Anyhow, this alarming conversation got me back on track. Ignited the work.
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Photo courtesy Jezebel
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by Sophy on Apr 20th, 2012
Today we are delighted to bring you an extract from the short story “Warm Enough”, which appears in Colleen Higgs‘ brand new collection, Looking for Trouble. The collection consists of ten stories, centring on the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville in the late eighties and early nineties.
In “Warm Enough” – a nostalgic and humorous piece – we are privy to one side of a conversation between old friends who have lost touch with each other:
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Grant lived in a flat at the bottom end of Dunbar Street. You didn’t ever see his flat did you? I only went there a couple of times. And the one time I visited him there he’d filled his whole flat with branches he’d brought in from when the Council pruned the plane trees in his road. He was so mal, hey. Bos bevok. He didn’t want to leave them there to die in the street like rubbish, he said. His place spaced me out, completely. Apart from the branches, which was enough to push me over the edge, his flat was dirty and I mean vuil, hey. Dishes and pizza boxes and crusty pots rotting all over the place and I’m not exaggerating. Stompies and bottlenecks – not even in ashtrays. The oke was living like an animal. I was glad my old lady couldn’t see how he was living, she would have turned in her grave. Well she isn’t dead yet, but you know what I mean. No furniture apart from the mattress and sheets and blankets so filthy you couldn’t tell what colour they were originally. It was worse than bergies, and that’s saying something. I couldn’t stop myself from tuning him, “Sies man Grant, how can you live like this? Are you a dog?” But you know what? Not even dogs, not even pigs live like that.
Old Grant was always such a joker, so full of life and laughs, I felt like a dried up old prune around him, even when we were kids. He could always make you hose yourself. But I’m sorry, that flat was the end for me. Something inside me tightened. It scared me. I don’t think Ruth ever went there, she would have run a mile. Grant used to visit her in his leather jacket, somehow emerging from that bloody pig sty cleaned up enough for a person like Ruth to be cool with. No you’ve got to hand it to the oke, he’s pulled off some tricks in his day and getting involved with Ruth was one of those occasions – big time.
[...]
I remember this one night, we were all at Dawson’s. It was before Ruth and Nathan split up, she and I were still friends and somehow Grant came along for the ride that night. He used to pitch up at my place when he wanted something to eat and he couldn’t come up with a better plan. One time when he couldn’t find me he ate loquats from one of those big gardens in Jan Smuts near the Zoo, where the trees hang over onto the pavement. Anyway I think that was when they met, Grant and Ruth. The Radio Rats were making a comeback and Dawson’s was cooking. People like James Phillips and Johannes Kerkorrel showed up. Definitely the best jol in Joburg that night. We all danced like mal, even Nathan, who wasn’t really a dancer. His heart wasn’t in it, but that night he was jiving with the best of us. That journalist who got shot a few months later in Katlehong was there too. Everybody was at Dawson’s, even the short drug dealer who always wore that mustard-yellow felt homburg. When I think about it now, it was like we were celebrating the end of something terrible that we’d lived through our whole lives. It was like the war was over and who the fuck knew what would happen next?
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