Alan Finlay's The cactus of a bright sky available from Clarke's in Cape Town

Alan Finlay's chapbook The cactus of a bright sky is also available from Clarke's bookstore in Cape Town. You can order it here-- or, if you live in Cape Town, why not pop in to the store and buy a copy in person?

Copies of Off-ramp still available

A finalist for the 2014 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, Off-ramp is the debut short fiction collection of Gary Cummiskey and consists of ten stories often characterised by a surreal eroticism. Set mainly in contemporary South Africa, the book opens with a young man’s hallucinatory encounter with a derelict in a Johannesburg street; there is a couple’s visit to a sinister Free State farm; an editor who reluctantly agrees to meet an aspiring woman writer at midnight; two young men who go out on a drinking spree as the country teeters on the edge of civil war; a restless teenager who stalks an unknown woman; and a middle-aged academic who engages in an obsessive, sadistic relationship with a prostitute.

The stories in this startling collection offer a vision of individuals who are slowly being devoured by paranoia and absurdity. Beyond the off-ramp lies a pervasive, heavy dread and an unnameable, perhaps unknowable fear. Cummiskey creates an off-kilter reality that is both disturbing and compelling.

Off-ramp is available at R200 per copy, by courier, for South Africa. For overseas the cost is R320 (normal mail).

Email me at dyehardpress@iafrica,com for order details.

Copies of The Fall by Hans Pienaar have arrived!

 

Dedalus decides to flee South Africa but his plane crashes somewhere else on the continent. He miraculously survives but is taken captive by a militia whom he believes wants to kill him. Making promises to use his skills to help them, he gets involved in the politics and religious complexities of the local community. They allow him to design a series of gods to meet the needs they appear to have.

Hans Pienaar’s first collection of poems in English tends towards a novel in verse, or a draft for a Netflix series in poems, if you will. Told in many styles and voices, it is an attempt to distill his experiences while travelling in the rest of Africa as foreign correspondent for a newspaper group. There is a lot of humour, but also deadly earnest in the meeting of Greek mythology and a people run down by colonialism and modernity, and of course, things do not go according to plan. Whether it ends on a pessimistic or optimistic note probably depends on the reader.

Pienaar is an award-winning writer of mainly Afrikaans novels, plays and poetry who lives in the Western Cape. His latest poetry collection, Seisoene op Parool (Seasons on Parole) was published by Protea Books in January 2021, and it will also release his latest novel, Kaap, in February 2022.

The Fall can be ordered from the author at mwhanspi@gmail.com for R350, postage included (by South African post office), or you can order an e-book version for free. If you want the book couriered to you, speak to the author.

140 pages.

ISBN: 978-0-9947231-1-6 print

ISBN: 978-0-9947231-2-3 e-book

 

We have unearthed four copies of With the Safety Off

It’s Yeoville in the mid-1990s. 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.

From now on, he’s living with the safety off.

A novel not for the faint-hearted ...

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. Feltham died in December 2017.

With introductions by Luke Feltham and James de Villiers.

220 pp.

ISBN 978-0-9869982-6-3

I can have the book couriered to your door within 24 hours (excepting weekends) for a total of R260.00.

Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order!

In the wrong place

 

In deep

 

A nail in the mind

 

Chatsworth available on Made in Durban

A reminder that Pravasan Pillay's much-acclaimed collection of short stories, Chatsworth, is available for R190 (including postage) from Made in Durban.