It’s the mid-1990s. Yeoville, along with the rest of South
Africa, is in the midst of change. Enter Fig, a copywriter with a penchant for
living on the edge – staying up all night, having casual sex and snorting
cocaine. Drifting from seedy clubs to grotty flats, Fig continues his aimless
odyssey … until the day he falls asleep in a client presentation and is
fired.
Nine months later Fig is hooked on heroin and turns to
drug-dealing for survival. If his previous lifestyle skirted close to the
danger zone, it’s now gloves off as he drops all pretence of respectability and
descends into a world of syndicates and violence. There is no going back, but
Fig doesn’t care.
From now on, he’s living with the safety off – no matter
where it leads him.
At once harrowing and humourous, despairing and cynical, Graeme
Feltham’s stark novel With the Safety Off plumbs the depths of mid-1990s
South Africa, capturing both the exhilaration of freedom and the insecurity
that comes with change.
216 pp
ISBN 978-0-9869982-6-3
Jointly published by Dye Hard Press and altoviolet.
Pricing to be confirmed.
Cover art (provisional): James de Villiers
Graeme Feltham was
born in 1965 and grew up in Uitenhage. He completed a degree in journalism
at Rhodes University and moved to Johannesburg in the late 1980s. In addition
to being a writer, he was an experimental composer and performance artist. His
novella One Hundred Naked Beers was published by Brevitas in 2002. His
work also appeared in literary journals such as New Coin and donga.
Graeme took his own life in December 2017.
Pravasan Pillay has been interviewed about Chatsworth in the Swedish magazine Klass, which focuses on working-class literature. He chatted with journalist Beata Hansson about, among other things, melancholy, existentialism, outsiders, the body, class society and chai.
I have received an order for Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off from Paul Wessels, who heads the Master's degree in Creative Writing programme at Rhodes University, Makhanda. It seems Paul worked with Graeme 'a bit' on an earlier version of the novel - something I was not aware of - I was not even aware that Graeme and Paul (whom I have known since the early 1990s) knew each other. But there you go ... the novel continues to widen its reach.
Graeme Feltham's novel With the Safety Off, recently published by Dye Hard Press and altoviolet, is now listed on Goodreads. If you have read it and enjoyed it, why not pop in and give it a short review?
John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer(Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015), Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017). More recently he has published a limited-edition chapbook titled Dying like Dogs, published by Tangerine Press. He is the current Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He can be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
It’s the mid-1990s. Yeoville, along with the rest of South
Africa, is in the midst of change. Enter Fig, a copywriter with a penchant for
living on the edge – staying up all night, having casual sex and snorting
cocaine. Drifting from seedy clubs to grotty flats, Fig continues his aimless
odyssey … until the day he falls asleep in a client presentation and is
fired.
