Download or read book Tales of the Metric System written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-25 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.
Download or read book The African Novel of Ideas written by Jeanne-Marie Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature. Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought. The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.
Download or read book The Institute for Taxi Poetry written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2012-05-10 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solly Greenfields, the first of the taxi poets, has been shot dead. At the Institute for Taxi Poetry, where they train young people to write poetry on the bodywork of Cape Town's taxis, Solly's protégé Adam Ravens tries to make sense of his death. Who killed Solly, and why is Adam's son acting so odd? In the world of Imraan Coovadia's new tragicomic novel taxi companies thrive in a single-party state. Taxi poets are admired, sliding-door men rule, professors and politicians strut and fret and connive in a society shaped by violence and ambition, love, and the unsettling power of the imagination.
Download or read book Postcolonial Poetics written by Elleke Boehmer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
Download or read book High Low In Between written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was nothing in the room to surprise her. She could understand exactly what had happened. She had known about this in the morning. She had known about it the day before, the month before, and in fact since the moment of her birth. The violent death of her biologist husband forces Nafisa into a world of illegal organ transplants, bribery, and scientific and political controversy. With an acute sense of the disruptions of contemporary South Africa, and its keen feeling for love and loss, High Low In-between reveals Nafisa’s relationships with the people close to her and the anarchic currents of life and death she discovers.
Download or read book A Spy In Time written by Imraan Coovadia and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Ilube Nommo Award for Best Novel Finalist for the 2019 Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science-Fiction Novel Award-winning South African novelist Imraan Coovadia tells the story of a fledgling temporal secret agent named Enver Eleven. Enver teams up with a new handler, Shanumi Six, on a vital mission to preserve humanity's legacy. In Enver Eleven's city, fair-skinned people are a rarity and have been for centuries. They work as acrobats and jugglers or apply skin-darkening creams to conceal their condition. Johannesburg is the city that survived the end of the world thanks to the shelter provided by the thousands of miles of mining tunnels running beneath it. It's Enver's job at the Agency to make sure that the end of the world doesn't come again. He and his mentor, Shanumi Six, specialize in the hot spots of the twentieth century-Marrakech, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo-where they travel in search of an elusive enemy, guided by the collective intelligence of the Agency's thinking machines which limit time travel to the bare minimum. When Shanumi vanishes on an assignment, Enver finds himself in the middle of a catastrophe which will require him to put his assumptions to the test in an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue.
Download or read book The Wedding written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-11-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in India and South Africa, "The Wedding"--a subcontinental version of "The Taming of the Shrew"--is a brilliantly funny and tender first novel about the choices we make and the homes that we build.
Download or read book Welcome to Our Hillbrow written by Phaswane Mpe and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome To Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow - microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring and painful in the changing South African psyche. Everything is there: the shattered dreams of youth, sexuality and its unpredictable costs, AIDS, xenophobia, suicide, the omnipotent violence that often cuts short the promise of young people, and the Africanist understanding of the life continuum that does not end with death but flows on into an ancestral realm. Infused with the rhythms of the inner city pulsebeat, this courageous novel is compelling in its honesty and its broad vision, which links Hillbrow, rural Tiragalong and Oxford. It spills out the guts of Hillbrow-living with the same energy and intimate knowledge ,with which the Drum writers wrote Sophiatown into being.
Download or read book Transnational Russian Studies written by Andy Byford and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-07 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on how Russia has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. Treating culture as an expanding field, it offers original case studies in Russia’s imperial entanglements; the life of things ‘Russian’, including the language, beyond the nation’s boundaries, and Russia’s positioning in the globalized world.
Download or read book Small Things written by Nthikeng Mohlele and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this haunting tale of love and learning, the existential chaos of a life ravaged by circumstance takes on a rhythm of its own, one bound by loss and loneliness, but also an intelligent awareness of self. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes brutal, occasionally funny and infuriating, a journalist-comrade-lover caught up in the shade and shadow of politics and social injustice faces treachery and betrayal on every level. Set against the backdrop of a cityscape that taunts and tantalises, this is where love fails and passion wanes, “where suffering has no meaning”, where an individual escapes death only to find himself confronted with choices wrought by remorse and retribution, by conscience and character. And yet, with all trauma, there is a distinct musicality to the lyrical unpacking that follows a string of small things ...
Download or read book The Poisoners written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poisoners is a history of four devastating chapters in the making of the region, seen through the disturbing use of toxins and accusations of poisoning circulated by soldiers, spies, and politicians in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Imraan Coovadia’s fascinating new book exposes the secret use of poisons and diseases in the Rhodesian bush war and independent Zimbabwe, and the apparent connection to the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States; the enquiry into the chemical and biological warfare programme in South Africa known as Project Coast, discovered through the arrest and failed prosecution of Dr Wouter Basson; the use of toxic compounds such as Virodene to treat patients at the height of the Aids epidemic in South Africa, and the insistence of the government that proven therapies like Nevirapine, which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were in fact poisons; and the history of poisoning and accusations of poisoning in the modern history of the African National Congress, from its guerrilla camps in Angola to Jacob Zuma’s suggestion that his fourth wife collaborated with a foreign intelligence agency to have him murdered. But The Poisoners is not merely a book of history. It is also a meditation, by a most perceptive commentator, on the meaning of race, on the unhappy history of black and white in southern Africa, and on the nature of good and evil.
Download or read book Relocations written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 2009 and 2012, the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town held the Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture series which became a celebrated part of Cape Town’s cultural landscape, demonstrating current intellectual and creative thinking in South Africa. These lectures gave audiences a chance to engage with transformative texts and questions, to hear thought leaders speak on the ideas, the books, the art, and the films that matter to them and to us. Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists André Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection’s editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Today’s readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.
Download or read book The Dream House written by Craig Higginson and published by Pan Macmillan South africa. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A farmhouse is being reproduced a dozen times, with slight variations, throughout a valley. Three small graves have been dug in the front garden, the middle one lying empty. A woman in a wheelchair sorts through boxes while her husband clambers around the old demolished buildings, wondering where the animals have gone. A young woman – called ‘the barren one’ behind her back – dreams of love, while an ageing headmaster contemplates the end of his life. At the entrance to the long dirt driveway, a car appears and pauses – pointed towards the house like a silver bullet, ticking with heat. So begins The Dream House, Craig Higginson’s riveting and unforgettable novel set in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal. Written with dark wit, a stark poetic style and extraordinary tenderness, this is a story about the state of a nation and a deep meditation on memory, ageing, meaning, family, love and loss. This updated 2016 edition contains new content, with Craig Higginson exploring the background to The Dream House, his varied experiences in a farmhouse in KwaZulu-Natal and the subsequent and poignant motivations for this moving novel.
Download or read book Tales of the Metric System written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike. An unforgettable cast of characters includes Ann, who is trying to protect her husband and son in 1970, and Victor, whose search for a missing document in 1973 will change his life forever. Rock guitarist Yash takes his boy to the beach on Boxing Day in 1979 to meet his revolutionary cousin, while Shanti, his granddaughter, loses her cellphone and falls in love twice on a lucky afternoon in 2010. Playwrights, politicians, philosophers, and thieves, all caught in their individual stories, burst from the pages of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System as it measures South Africa’s modern history in its own remarkable units of imagination. Simple in concept, complex in construction, a novel which is so much more than the sum of its parts, one which purports to examine the randomness of life while delicately drawing the eye to the butterfly effect of individual acts and exposing the interconnectedness of people. In pristine prose and with a telling eye for detail, Tales of the Metric System leaves the reader with a sense of having undertaken a journey through the familiar only to arrive somewhere completely new – Aminatta Forna, author of The Memory of Love
Download or read book The Promise written by Damon Galgut and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones. “Simply: you must read it.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine
Download or read book South African Writing in Transition written by Rita Barnard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid? Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country's literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.
Download or read book Authority and Authorship in V S Naipaul written by I. Coovadia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom,asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.
