Download or read book The Institute for Taxi Poetry written by Imraan Coovadia and published by . This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 216 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 protaegae Adam Ravens tries to make sense of his death. Who killed Solly, and why is Adam's son acting so odd?... "--P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book A National Treasure written by Thando Niovane and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Taxi Night written by Cliff Fyman and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cliff Fyman's Taxi Night is a splendid and powerful book-length poem in four parts. The real-life patter and ambience of his fares reach the hackie, Fyman, as he transports a rainbow cast of denizens around the boroughs from 5 p.m. until 5 a.m. The first two sections are transcribed from overheard cellphone combat, or a jiving fare who tries to play Fyman verbally, or more than a few nutcases. But Fyman's show is the farthest thing from a freak show. Each appearance at the mike, so to speak, is brief. Fyman presents the words he captures in precisely sculpted form, ingenious line breaks, one word lines - from-the-gut poems which retain a credible verbatim and are rigorously artful. Eloquence in their realism. The last two sections increasingly are transcribed from Fyman's own silent, deeply inner verbatim. These pieces are equally Swiss-movement poems. Vibrant slices of anonymous lives rendered with a dramedy of depth and compassion. A moving celebration of whatever we become when we buy a ride and take to the backseat stage. -JOHN GODFREYTaxi Night is strong and clear like an ink drawing with bold lines that are few and stark but tell the whole story, the place and time, the people, how they think and speak, the music of it, a documentation of the undocumented, simultaneously very close and very far, which is how people are. -TANIA SUSSKINDThere's no better place to view the human condition than the driver's seat of a New York City cab. Just ask poet Cliff Fyman, who has transformed his stint behind the wheel into Taxi Night, a touching, sometimes mind-blowing work. Through lovingly handled "found" material; curious diction; and acute, sometimes deadpan observation, Fyman gives the reader all the drama, humor and pathos that comes from a steady stream of humanity in the backseat. He has an excellent ear for everyday speech and the sharp editing skills of a top-notch documentarian. Read Taxi Night slowly or breathlessly. Read it all the way through or read it in bits. Either way, you're in for a great ride. -PETER BUSHYEAGER Dude, they are pure gold! They capture the upper class in unguarded moments. Yr bits are the highlight of my day! -RON KOLM
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 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 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 Taste of Cherry written by Kara Candito and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Kara Candito's prize-winning debut collection a "garish/human theatre" comes to life against richly textured geographic and psychic landscapes. These poems are high-speed meditations on a world where Walter Benjamin meets the "glitzy chain-link of Chanel scarves" and Puccini's Tosca meets the din of the Times Square subway station. Ferociously witty and intensely lyrical, Taste of Cherry speaks to us in a language that is simultaneously private and public, sensual and cerebral.
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 Wedding written by Imraan Coovadia and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-12-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in India and South Africa, The Wedding joins Ismet Nassin, a clerk of modest prospects from Bombay, and Khateja, a village beauty he marries on the very day he spies her from the window of his train. Matrimony happens fast, love lags behind. Khateja is willful, difficult, and misanthropic—in short, highly desirable. Ismet is in for the battle of his life. Based upon the story of his grandparents and his own upbringing in Durban, South Africa, Imraan Coovadia has written a brilliantly funny and tender first novel—an alternately poignant and hilarious story about the choices we make and the homes that we build. The Wedding is a witty and wonderful subcontinental The Taming of the Shrew.
Download or read book The New Testament written by Jericho Brown and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honored as a "Best Book of 2014" by Library Journal NPR.org writes: “In his second collection, The New Testament, Brown treats disease and love and lust between men, with a gentle touch, returning again and again to the stories of the Bible, which confirm or dispute his vision of real life. 'Every last word is contagious,' he writes, awake to all the implications of that phrase. There is plenty of guilt—survivor’s guilt, sinner’s guilt—and ever-present death, but also the joy of survival and sin. And not everyone has the chutzpah to rewrite The Good Book.”—NPR.org "Erotic and grief-stricken, ministerial and playful, Brown offers his reader a journey unlike any other in contemporary poetry."—Rain Taxi "To read Jericho Brown's poems is to encounter devastating genius."—Claudia Rankine In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing—and the truth is coming on fast. Fairy Tale Say the shame I see inching like steam Along the streets will never seep Beneath the doors of this bedroom, And if it does, if we dare to breathe, Tell me that though the world ends us, Lover, it cannot end our love Of narrative. Don’t you have a story For me?—like the one you tell With fingers over my lips to keep me From sighing when—before the queen Is kidnapped—the prince bows To the enemy, handing over the horn Of his favorite unicorn like those men Brought, bought, and whipped until They accepted their masters’ names. Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award. He currently teaches at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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 Social Poetics written by Mark Nowak and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Poetics documents the imaginative militancy and emergent solidarities of a new, insurgent working class poetry community rising up across the globe. Part autobiography, part literary criticism, part Marxist theory, Social Poetics presents a people’s history of the poetry workshop from the founding director of the Worker Writers School. Nowak illustrates not just what poetry means, but what it does to and for people outside traditional literary spaces, from taxi drivers to street vendors, and other workers of the world.
Download or read book Do You Have a Band written by Daniel Kane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.
Download or read book All This Time written by Cedar Sigo and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new collection of poetry by Cedar Sigo"--
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.
Download or read book City Poet written by Brad Gooch and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of Frank O’Hara, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, the magnetic literary figure at the center of New York’s cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s. City Poet captures the excitement and promise of mid-twentieth-century New York in the years when it became the epicenter of the art world, and illuminates the poet and artist at its heart. Brad Gooch traces Frank O’Hara’s life from his parochial Catholic childhood to World War II, through his years at Harvard and New York. He brilliantly portrays O’Hara in in his element, surrounded by a circle of writers and artists who would transform America’s cultural landscape: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and John Ashbery. Gooch brings into focus the artistry and influence of a life “of guts and wit and style and passion” (Luc Sante) that was tragically abbreviated in 1966 when O’Hara, just forty and at the height of his creativity, was hit and killed by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island—a death that marked the end of an exceptional career and a remarkable era. City Poet is illustrated with 55 black and white photographs.
