‘Summertime’ is a meandering series of interviews with relatives and former lovers of ‘John Coetzee.’
John C. Hawley
Point Counterpoint
J M Coetzee rsquo s critics suggested some years ago that he and some others Zakes Mda Zoe Wicomb needed to use their artistry more obviously in the political cause Defenders argued that literature had to maintain and expand South Africa rsquo s literary culture for a future that otherwise wou
Side by Side in the Forest
If Robert Satloff rsquo s recent book Among the Righteous Lost Stories From the Holocaust rsquo s Long Reach Into Arab Lands 2006 offers a freshly conceived if ultimately stark investigation into the archive of small kindnesses shown the occasional Jew during the Second World War Mimi Schwar
Oke’s Odyssey
If Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are arguably the grandfathers of Nigerian literature and Ben Okri and Buchi Emecheta are their successors Chris Abani Chimamanda Adichie and Helen Habila would appear to be coming into their own these days as the next wave Adichie author of Purple Hibiscus Alg
Village Scandal, Mountain Spirits
Until recently South Africa rsquo s fiction has been totally dominated by apartheid But in 1992 the government of F W de Klerk won a mandate for political reforms that led to an official end to apartheid and the creation of a power-sharing multiracial government and since that time many have wo
More Mania Irrelevancyor Extinction?Try It, You’ll Like It
T C Boyle rsquo s collected short stories 1998 amply confirmed his impressive imagination and facility with language and narration In these 16 new ones nine of which appeared in The New Yorker in recent years Boyle again displays his ease in entering the minds of his principal characters and
The Wrong’ Rebecca
When Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925 her fourth novel she set out to demonstrate what she thought was needed in modern fiction an examination of the interior of her characters the stream of consciousness that holds each of us together from moment to moment What did not interest
