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Dwight Garner Reviews Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla...
Verdict: carrot If Silicon Valley was holding out for a hero after Steve Jobs’s death, a disrupter in chief, it has found a brawny one in Mr. Musk. This South African-born entrepreneur, inventor and...
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Listen to the 5 Stories Shortlisted for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing
Podcasts of the five stories shortlisted for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing have been uploaded and are available to listen to, for free. South Africans Masande Ntshanga and FT Kola read...
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Highlights of the 2015 South African Book Fair
Here are some of the highlights of the 2015 South African Book Fair, taking place in Johannesburg from 31 July to 2 August. The SABF programme was released last week, and will feature over 100...
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Get Goosebumps this Fiction Friday with an Excerpt from Chigozie Obioma’s The...
Read an excerpt from The Fishermen, the debut novel of Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma that is going places. The Fishermen, which was published in April, has been longlisted for the 2015 Center for...
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Argentine Author Faces Prison Sentence for “Plagiarising” Borges in Literary...
Argentine novelist, poet and university lecturer Pablo Katchadjian faces up to six years in prison, after his literary experiment involving Jorge Luis Borges’ The Aleph. The lawsuit was initiated by...
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Sunday Read: John Green Shares the Story Behind the Story of Paper Towns...
Paper Towns is a novel by John Green, best known for his first YA novel The Fault in Our Stars. Paper Towns, which featured fifth on the New York Times bestseller list in the first week after its...
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Jenn Lawrence Reviews Day Four by Sarah Lotz
Verdict: critical carrot Readers new to Sarah Lotz are likely not to have the same reaction or response as I have in reading this novel. I won’t go as far as to not recommend this title, but simply...
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Practical Action to Decolonise the “White Literary System”: The African...
Fortiscue Helepi, the founder and owner of African Flavour Books, an independent bookshop in the Vaal, gave a presentation at the Jacana Media offices in Johannesburg last week as the first in the...
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Zambia’s Namwali Serpell Wins the 2015 Caine Prize for “The Sack”
Alert! Namwali Serpell has been announced as the winner of the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story, “The Sack”. Serpell receives £10 000, while each shortlistee received £500....
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It’s All About Grey’s, uhm, Anatomy: Pearl Boshomane on Reading the Latest...
By Pearl Boshomane for the Sunday Times Grey: 50 Shades of Grey as Told by Christian EL James (Random House) Have you ever watched a bad Nollywood movie? I have. Aside from predictably silly plots,...
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Horror Ahoy: Sue de Groot Talks to Sarah Lotz About Day Four
By Sue de Groot for the Sunday Times Day Four Sarah Lotz (Hodder & Stoughton) ***** When Stephen King praised Sarah Lotz’s previous novel, The Three, calling it “hard to put down and vastly...
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“I Don’t Think Writing is a Competitive Sport”– Namwali Serpell on Why She is...
Who is Namwali Serpell, and what makes her 2015 Caine Prize-winning short story “The Sack” so compelling? At the announcement, Zoë Wicomb, chair of the judging panel for this year’s prize, said of...
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Short Story Masterclass with Caine Prize Winner Namwali Serpell: “If You Want...
Besides being an incredible writer of short stories, 2015 Caine Prize winner Namwali Serpell is also a respected academic. As associate professor of English at the University of California,...
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Saul Austerlitz Reviews Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
Verdict: carrot Ashlee Vance’s thoroughly researched, thoughtful Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future has come along to provide the next serving of techno-utopian fantasia....
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Fiction Friday: An Excerpt from South African-born Author Rosie Rowell’s...
South African-born author Rosie Rowell and her editor Emily Thomas have been announced as the winners of the 2015 Branford Boase Award for Leopold Blue, published by Hot Key Books. The Branford Boase...
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Ginger Nuts of Horror Reviews Under Ground by SL Grey
Verdict: carrot Under Ground is a taught, tight and claustrophobic novel that uses it’s small cast of characters and the confined and limited narrative settings to great effect. Barring a few scene...
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Sunday Read: Read or Listen to the First Chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a...
The Guardian has released an exclusive extract from Harper Lee’s long-awaited new novel, Go Set a Watchman, which will be released this month in South Africa by Penguin Random House. Readers will...
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Jennifer Kay Reviews Day Four by Sarah Lotz
Verdict: critical carrot It’s when the cruise ship drifts into supernatural waters that “Day Four” stalls, mired like “The Three” in too many possible explanations for the horrors. If it’s the journey...
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RIP Chenjerai Hove (1956 – 2015)
According to media reports, award-winning Zimbabwean writer, poet and essayist Chenjerai Hove has died in Norway at the age of 59. I always tell people that if they want to know about the history of...
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8 Things to Expect from Go Set A Watchman – Based on Early Reviews
Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman, perhaps one of the most hotly anticipated books ever, has gone on sale today. Many bookshops around the world stayed open all night to cope with demand. While...
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