Dye Hard Press celebrates 30 years of publishing anti-bestsellers!

Wow, I have just realised that Dye Hard Press is 30 years old this month! That's 30 years of publishing anti-bestsellers! While it would not be an overstatement to say that Dye Hard Press is on life support, we are stilll around!

Thank you to all those who have supported us throughout the years.

Below are two of our most successful titles:

Arja Salafranca reading at the Red Wheelbarrow

Check out Dye Hard Press author Arja Salafranca reading at The Red Wheelbarrow this Thursday night. Dye Hard Press has published two of Arja's collections -- The fire in which we burn and Beyond touch (with Modjaji Books). Arja also selected the stories for the much-acclaimed short fiction anthology The Edge of Things.

Interview with Gary Cummiskey in Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World)

An interview with Gary Cummiskey in the Kolkata-based Bengali literary journal Boier Duniya (The Book World) by poet and publisher Subhankar Das. Subhankar is currently publishing my latest collection of poetry, Somewhere else.

An English translation of the interview is below:

When did you start writing poetry?

I was about fourteen when I started. One day in school our English teacher set us an exercise. He played the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac track 'Albatross' and told us to listen carefully. Then he told us to write a poem about an albatross for homework. I think I was the only kid in the class who liked the idea! That night I wrote a poem about a dying albatross and realised I wanted to write more poems … and so it started.

 

Tell us about your magazine Green Dragon.

Green Dragon was a literary journal that I published from 2002 to 2009. It ran to six issues and featured both poetry and prose, as well as interviews and reviews. The first two issues were staple bound, while the others were perfect bound. I printed about 300 copies of each issue. I published mainly South African writers but also some overseas ones, mainly from the US, but also from the Netherlands and the UK. The seventh issue was scheduled to be a short-fiction special, with material selected by South African writer and poet Arja Salafranca. But the amount of material we received was so big that it turned out to be a huge anthology in its own right, called The Edge of Things, which appeared in 2011 and was highly acclaimed. Green Dragon did not continue after that. I got tired of it, it was a huge amount of work.

 

Your favourite poets and how do they move you?

I have so many favourite poets and my preferences change. But my main influences have been the US beat poets and the modern French poets. Among the US beats my favourites are Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman, as well as more borderline beats such as Marty Matz and Philip Lamantia. Among the French, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Prévert, Joyce Mansour and Claude Pélieu. Also the Spanish-language modernists, such as Neruda, Vallejo and Lorca. Among South African poets definitely Wopko Jensma, Sinclair Beiles and Seitlhamo Motsapi. A feature that that they all share is a willingness to experiment with language, to use language in new ways, often in a subversive manner. I am both intrigued and inspired by poetry that aims to challenge the norms in which language is presented or used.

You know about the Hungryalist writer movement here in the 60s, you were a friend of Pradip Choudhury. Do you think there is a common theme of independence or something worth mentioning about their work? Falguni Roy was also an important poet and Sharmy made a short film Eebang Falguni aka The lost lines of a beauty monster, which you have seen.

From the few Hungryalist writers whom I have read, there are certainly common voices of independence, of breaking away from conventional literary forms, a willingness to experiment, to take risks. There is definitely a countercultural stance. I have often seen the Hungryalists referred to as ‘the hungry generation’, which sounds similar to ‘the beat generation’. I don’t know where that phrase originated from, and while, yes, the Hungryalists and the beats shared a lot of common concerns and there was interaction between them – eg Ginsberg in India, and Ferlinghetti publishing some of the writers in the City Lights Journal, plus corresponding with Malay Roy Choudhury – the scenes were quite different, and in no way do I see the Hungryalists as ‘India’s version of the beats’ – the Hungryalists had emerged quite independently of the beats.

Falguni Roy is an interesting poet and I would really love to read more of his work – has there been a complete volume published in India? A tragic figure, publishing one collection in his lifetime and dying of drug abuse, and certainly influenced by the Hungryalists.

I sent you a book by Subimal Misra who was an antiestablishment exponent here, any comments. 

I haven’t read The Golden Gandhi Statue from America for a while, but I have it set aside for a reread. That book had a big influence on me as it encouraged me to continue writing short fiction, short fiction that didn’t have to follow conventional lines, or even have a narrative in the traditional sense. I liked what Misra said about his work not appearing in bookstores because bookstores sold products called books. That resonated with me deeply, as independent voices rarely find themselves stocked in bookstores here in SA. And I love that Misra dedicated the book to Jean-Luc Godard, whom, Misra says, taught him language.

Sky Dreaming, a chapbook of poems by you was published by Graffiti Arts Collective in 2011. I still remember Pravasan [Pillay] handing over the cover design of this book to me in Sweden in the venue where I was doing my poetry reading. Mouni Mondal did a  small chapbook translating a few poems from this book in Bengali and she did a good job.  Now this year we will be doing another poetry chap of yours, Somewhere else. Tell us about this new project and how you usually compose a poem?

Somewhere else is a collection of 26 poems, composed over the past four or five years. Some of them were inspired by a trip I took to Turkey in 2019. As usual with me, some of them are prose poems. And most of them quite surreal. Poems come to me – usually when I least expect it, not when I am thinking of writing. I can’t force poems out. I can’t sit down and decide to write a poem. The poem comes or it doesn’t. And while the initial inspiration may see the poem written down spontaneously, I do spend a lot of time on revision. I believe in craft in poetry.

I admire that work of yours on Sinclair Beiles, what a book. His books of poems are hard to find here. I wish I had a few so that I can translate his poems in Bengali. A beat poet who never got any recognition. What was the reason behind that?

There are a few reasons behind Beiles’s lack of recognition as a poet. First, from a South African literary perspective, he spent much of life outside the country. He wasn’t an active participant in the local literary scene until about the 1980s, but by his own admittance he didn’t want to fit in, anyway. Most of his publications were very small, limited editions – one chapbook in the 1970s was only 20 copies – another collection, in the 1990s, was only four copies. This has made access to his work very difficult. In fact, after the publication of the first edition of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in 2009, I found a chapbook of his I had not been previously aware of. Even the University of South Africa, which has most of his titles, neither had it nor had heard of it.

How is the independent writers' scene in SA? Here I count on the young guns. 

The independent writing scene is still around, and always will be, hopefully. South Africa has always had independent voices. One of the greatest threats to independent voices, in South Africa and elsewhere, is self-censorship: giving in and producing what is politically, culturally or commercially acceptable – and marketable. The temptation to produce what will generate applause and accolades – market success. The main challenge for independent writers, however, is the lack of publishing outlets and the ability to find readers. We need more small, independent presses in South Africa that publish quality, innovative work. We could do with more journals, and certainly more online journals.

Review of The Edge of Things, by Sope Maithufi

 

Arja Salafranca’s two-page “Introduction” to her collection of short stories, The edge of things, extols the virtues of the short story genre and delights in the energy recently injected into the publishing of this art. Written in the form of an editorial, this opening naturally also takes the reader on a rather hurried tour of the many related themes contained in the stories. My review, by contrast, focuses on a cumulative impression that the stories make in relation to their challenging South African settings.

Her book is a helix of twenty-four short stories that elaborate on what it means to expand moral compass in the South Africa that is mired in prejudice and coercive discourses. This is a theme that sets the book apart from some of the South African collections of poetry and short stories such as The heart in exile and Transitions. These respond to the dawn of non-racial democracy by valorizing the quotidian. The short fiction in Salafranca’s book “gathers” the concept of the everyday into a coil of localities, each vibrant with “governmentality”. Reading them resembles setting a whorl in motion and watching a swell and quell of portraits of power. Some, fashioned by the dominant social narratives of apartheid such as race and nation, appear to jostle for prominence with those hatched in liminal spaces between whiteness and blackness, and between the semiotic and the symbolic. Feminist in shape, these images appear in manifestations that reveal complexities within possibly the very basis of the dawn of nonracial democracy: the existential “being for the other”. As a result, some of these stories deploy narrative perspectives that deftly cross over ontological boundaries with ease.

The first story, “Bounce” by Jayne Bauling, sets the tone. It is a striking reminder of a famous story, Jack Cope’s “Power”. Central to this story is a young boy who successfully implores his parents to take pity on a bird that is apparently trapped in an Eskom electric power line. The narrator’s documentation of this character’s pleading on the bird’s behalf incidentally spells out his maturation in terms of liberal human ideals. Integral to this growth appears to be a valorization and privileging of nature above industrialization. Bauling’s “Bounce”, by contrast, is subtly neither interested in certainties nor in the kind of fruition that is linear. This story considers an elderly woman’s concern about the fate of a bird caught in the mouth of a dog. The story poses further questions about the moralities of sympathy and intervention that have possibly yet to be elaborated upon in ecocritical perspectives. For, as a human being standing outside of and, paradoxically, within the world of animals where the norm is “survival of the fittest”, how much swathe of human ethics is to be worn or shed in “being for the animal other”?

Arja Salafranca’s “The iron lung” further expands on the concern with how the human imagination can gel with everyday life. As it were, this story subtly substitutes the notion of a desperate bird with that of the narrator’s indigent mother and father, afflicted by polio and cancer, respectively. Also reminiscent of “Bounce”, the focus falls primarily on an able-bodied subject, Rosemarie, especially on her alleged magnanimity towards her parents. Throughout the story, the narrative crisscrosses from her to her mother who is described as being “in an iron lung” for the “last thirty-seven years” (19). Both “voices” unwittingly corroborate each other, revealing that her empathy for her parents is severely undermined by her intense unhappiness in having to nurse them. This displeasure is apparent when she regrets that her taking care of her parents makes her forfeit her basic right to have relationships such as in marriage or having a boyfriend.

However, if, as also demonstrated in Magdalena Karina’s “The basket”, the ethics of expecting compassion are gendered and patronizing, then there is a need to argue for feminisms that are mobile and tactical. The storyline, for instance, introduces the challenges. Elizabeth’s husband, Rainer, has just passed on after his car had collided with another driven by a woman whose name is not disclosed. The latter, comatose (77), is confined in a hospital. Prior to his death, he was opposed to Elizabeth seeking employment (69) and appears not to have been ardent when it came to love-making. This seems borne out in the narrative’s flashback to one incident in which Elizabeth poignantly reflects that “it had been years since [her husband had] tried to give her any particular pleasure” (67). When the story concludes, she delivers a bouquet of flowers to the woman at the hospital. This gesture appears to be paradoxical, because it signals her sympathy for her, but may also hint at the attempt to repress anger, perhaps as the passed-out woman is directly implicated in the car accident that claimed Rainer.

Ostensibly, by virtue of (indirectly) knowing the extent to which apartheid utilized them in order to mount a gendered racial supremacy, white women in the post-apartheid of this collection of stories endeavour to make up for the humiliation suffered by black men. In the story, “Cordelia, age 26”, the eponymous heroine artist suffers from manic depression, because she had learnt that clients did not like her graphic art, as they were interested in the black-authored ones. Subsequently, she hits the bottle and is ultimately jilted by her late 40s black boyfriend, Desmond, who is described as having never imagined white women as forbidden fruits to be plucked. Through this simple plot, the story may be interpreted as a post-colonial response to Frantz Fanon’s (1967, 41–82) notorious eliding of the white woman in “The woman of color and the white man” and in “The man of color and the white woman”. In the midst of one of her heated arguments with Desmond, the reader hears her “begging Desmond to be black”: “You don’t consider me a true African artist just because I’m white”, “Happy to lick the white pussy – but too embarrassed to introduce her to your black mama” (173). When this story concludes, Cordelia is taught by her only surviving relative, her white grandmother, to appreciate the endurance of and to emulate working-class black women. But one chore surfaces prominently: slaughtering fowl humanely REVIEWS Downloaded by [Brought to you by Unisa Library] at 04:13 22 August 2014 132 and ethically. Presumably, the sensitivities involved in this task, as they also resonate in “Bounce”, may be apparent in another white female protagonist, that of Hans Pienaar’s “Telephoning the enemy”, who reflects on how, not being “officially” subscribed with the African National Congress, apartheid tragically fails to conceive of the possibility of a full-scale war.

Also worth mentioning in this category of short stories that may be considered dramatic elaborations on the theme of “being for the other” are Angelina Sithebe’s “Sepia” and Jeanne Aromnik’s “Losses and gains”. In the first, the principal characters are a 45-yearold (184) black woman who is apparently haunted by “amadlozi” and her “sixty-five” (187) year-old white husband who is terminal with cancer. He reveals the glue that connects them together through mythopoeia after being initially opposed to her consulting “i’Sangoma”: “When we met your terror reflected mine like a mirror … . I believe we met through a connective energy in the dimension of the terminally petrified” (195).

By contrast, it seems that Aromnik’s “Losses and gains” will not countenance that cross-racial romance happens only under psychologically problematic contexts as, perhaps, the white male is indisputably the symbol of white colonial power. This is why central to this story is an explicit account of the alleged epistemic violence that informs J.M. Coetzee’s portrayal of women in Disgrace. In order to find this critique persuasive, however, the reader needs to agree to be hailed into “being for black women”. The power of this ideology is enunciated by the black heroine’s bewilderment by and annoyance at Coetzee’s apparently condescending approach towards the black women that his hero takes sexual advantage of.

It seems, therefore, that one may chart a leitmotif of gradual and systematic disavowal of the institution of marriage especially when, pertinent to it, it is the heterosexuality that these stories portray as misogynistic or that leads to psychological predicaments. Perhaps the story that cogently introduces this decadence is Gillian Schutte’s aptly-titled “Doubt” wherein the heroine is implicitly perturbed that “marriage … resulted in only knowing your intimate self through the reflection of one other person [or husband]” (59). This is because, in addition to his philandering, she poignantly discovers that the extra-marital affair that she begins out of frustration and loneliness is a mere farce that makes her project “the archetype” of a faithful husband (59) onto her boyfriend.

From this disillusionment with the heteronormative and racist discourses, it appears that, as dramatized in Bernard Levinson’s “Tokai”, difference is possible via a “radical wing of the feminist movement … the lesbian wing” (Eric Njeng 2007: 22). The plot of this story resonates with the reclamation of what Njeng (2007: 26) calls the “first impulse”, that is, the “primary relation” that all human beings have with their mothers and, for lesbians, with “motherhood” (2007: 27). Told mostly from the perspective of a midwife after she had assisted a woman of possibly black/Khoi descent give birth, the narrative presents a graphic account of how the former began a “secret dialogue between [her] hand and the womb” (126) as it engaged “rhythmic pulsations, discharging the afterbirth and passing the movement onto her till she “entered the pendulum beat, hearing [her] body” (126). It is interesting to note that this is a “dance” that excludes the child’s father who, through the narrator’s perspective, is part and parcel of the social symbolic that immediately disposes of the “afterbirth”. In possibly classic African ritual terms, the father’s ostensible burying of the placenta in the soil spiritually reconnects the child with the ancestors and pleads with them to intercede on its behalf.

The title story, Jenna Mervis’s “The edge of things”, Jennifer Lean’s “The end”, Beatrice Lamwaka’s “Trophy”, and Dan Wylie’s “Solitude” also explore liminality by focusing on the productive degrees to which those who are marginalized by the violence of the dominant social hegemonies re-insert themselves via tactical choices and strategies. However, these stories do not contain the intense drama of maturation that involves sexuality, emotions and rationality in comparable ways as Levinson’s “Tokai”. By contrast, Kaganof Aryan’s “Same difference”, the story that appears to associate male homosexuality with the Bohemian, is a puzzling oddity that seems to have been included in the collection merely for the sake of enunciating difference in radical terms. The dialogues in this story attest to people who have retreated from “Life” (112), who associate it with the femininity that they describe as sexually violent and who also reflect on themselves using the very rhetoric of the homophobic: “we’ve been fucked upside down and sideways by Miss Life. Neither of us was smart enough to surrender. We just taking it up the ass. Two assholes” (112).

Works cited

Cope, Jack. 1979. Power. In: G.E. de Villiers (ed.), Close to the sun: stories from Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa.

 De Kock, Leon & Ian Tromp (eds). 1996. The heart in exile: South African poetry in English, 1990–1995. London: Penguin Books.

Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1967. Black skin white masks. NY: Grove Press, Inc. MacKenzie, Craig (ed.), 1999.

Transitions: half a century of South African short stories. Cape Town: Francolin.

Njeng, Sipyinyu Eric. 2007. Lesbian poetics and the poetry of Audre Lorde. English academy review 24(1): 23–36.

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Dye Hard Press: South African Short Fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2011. 

This review by Sope Maitufi was published in Scutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, in October 2012.

TV appearnce on BookBytes, Salaamedia

 

Gary Cummiskey being interviewed by Shafinaaz Hassim, on BookBytes, Salamedia, on Sunday 24 July, 2022. A wonderful, warm conversation about poetry, short fiction and publishing in South Africa. We chatted a bit about Outside the cave in particular and I read one poem from the collection. Chatsworth and The Edge of Things were also discussed, as single collections and anthologies published by Dye Hard Press.

Chatsworth still on a roll!

Have just received an order for another five copies of Pravasan Pillay's Chatsworth! Along with Kobus Moolman's Left Over and the short story anthology The Edge of Things (edited by Arja Salafranca), Chatsworth is Dye Hard Press's most successful title by sales!

The Edge of Things: South African short fiction selected by Arja Salafranca

Dye Hard Press has FOUR copies left of The Edge of Things, the short fiction anthology edited by Arja Salafranca, which was published a few years back and received much critical acclaim. The Edge of Things contains 24 short stories by Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lakwana, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie. 

The cost is R190 per copy, including postage, for South Africa. For overseas the cost is R240, including postage. Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of The Edge of Things still available

Dye Hard Press has unearthed FIVE copies of The Edge of Things, the short fiction anthology edited by Arja Salafranca, which was published a few years back and received much critical acclaim. The Edge of Things contains 24 short stories by Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lakwana, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie. 

The cost is R180 per copy, including postage, for South Africa. For overseas the cost is R230, including postage. 

Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

Copies of The Edge of Things still in stock

Dye Hard Press has just THREE copies left of The Edge of Things, the short fiction anthology edited by Arja Salafranca, which was published a few years back and received much critical acclaim. The Edge of Things contains 24 short stories by Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lakwana, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie. 

The cost is R150 per copy, including postage - South Africa only. 

Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

From mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play: a review of The Edge of Things

In 1958 Randall Jarrell, the American poet, edited and brought out a collection of stories, Randall Jarrell’s Book of Stories, which contains a famous introduction. The book was long out of print
but has been recently republished as a New York Review Books Classic (2002). It is, naturally, very difficult to generalise about a book such as the one under review, but there is one section of
Jarrell’s introduction that seems pertinent to The Edge of Things, in its mixture of complexity and comprehensiveness:

It is so good, our stories believe, simply to remember: their elementary delight in recognition, familiarity, mimesis, is another aspect of their obsession with all the likenesses of the universe, those metaphors that Proust called essential to style. Stories want to know: everything from the first blaze and breathlessness and fragrance to the last law and structure, but, too, stories don’t want to know, don’t want to care, just want to do as they please. (Jarrell 2002: x)

The range of the story: from mimetic punctiliousness to imaginative free play. Arja Salafranca’s task, as compiler of The Edge of Things, is not to ponder the nature of short fiction; it is to present as many works as possible, with an eye on quality, in order to promote the genre in this country. She notes that the stories submitted for publication in the book showed ‘an astonishing variety of narratives and approaches, shifting from realism to playful absurdity and crossing the boundaries from the strictly fictional to something that sits just beyond fiction, but isn’t quite nonfiction either’ (p. 7). Jarrell would have approved.

Looking at the stories themselves one finds it hard to pick out those that deserve special mention, but let me refer to some. ‘Bounce’ (p. 9), by Jayne Bauling, is a curiously gripping account (perhaps because this reviewer has tried to do the same) of the attempted rescue of a baby lourie, psychologically bound to the loss of a murdered partner. Salafranca’s own ‘The Iron Lung’ (p.18), juxtaposes two first-person accounts, those of mother and daughter, about life with the iron lung device; the device assumes a figurative significance. Cunningly different from other stories is Liesl Jobson’s ‘You pay for the view: twenty tips for super pics’ (p. 30), a life story constructed around the said tips and moments captured as camera events. The events begin with
‘1. Hold it steady’, and end with ‘20. Watch the light’, and cover a period, not always in strictly chronological order, of 32 years. In this and other stories failed marriages are at issue. I think of Gillian Schutte’s ‘Doubt’ (p. 50), with its erotic daydreams, and Karina Magdalena Szczurek’s ‘The Basket’ (p. 62), where the death of a newly-retired husband in a motorbike accident actually brings the protagonist (and the reader) a sense of relief.

In the collection’s eponymous ‘The edge of things’ (p. 78), by Jenna Mervis, the protagonist is alone with her dog in a cottage on the edge of suburban space, that appears to be spied on by possible intruders. She is without, or is separated from, a partner, and the narrator uses this absence and her sense of vulnerability to create suspense. In the end, though, Samson the dog, in the middle of a moonlit night, leads her outdoors, away from her locks and alarms, into a magical dream dimension, ‘on the edge of things’ in a different sense from that originally suggested.

Pravasan Pillay’s ‘Mr Essop’ (p.137) is a matter-of-fact, Hemingwayesque account of an instance of coldly administered cruelty to a child, with some fine moments of dialogue in Chatsworth dialect. Again, it is obviously impossible to mention all the stories in the book, but let me conclude with a brief look at Dan Wylie’s ‘Solitude’ (p. 256). Here we find a punctiliously crafted story, indeed. The protagonist is an aloof, cynical academic, complacently single, with a distaste for the life around him. He works on a crossword puzzle, clue by clue. The puzzle proves intrinsic to the plot, as the life around him, with its grubbiness and despair, enters into his puzzle (though he remains imperturbable.

The book will appeal to lovers of fiction and narrative in whatever forms. Those who relish detail, those who desire free play, are catered for. Not all the stories are of the same quality, but each, in its way, is enjoyable, and is reflective of the old cliché that everyone carries a story, or stories, within him or her. There is something of this democracy of the narrative urge in these stories, which makes of them a useful and enlightening panorama of local experience, states of mind, and states of emotion.

Nicholas Meihuizen
First published in Literator, North-West University, South Africa

The Edge of Things and Arja Salafranca's The Thin Line on display at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012

The Edge of Things: South African Short Fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, was published by Dye Hard Press in 2011. Salafranca's debut collection of short fiction, The Thin Line, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. Salafranca was interviewed about her writing at the Anfasa stand at the Cape Town Book Fair 2012.

Review of The Edge of Things, in Wordsetc

An edge is the most exhilarating point for a story to place itself. Ask any reader. We don’t need cliff-scrabbling above a literal precipice; masters (and mistresses) of the form can hollow out spaces of mystery and risk beneath the most prosaic inner or outer landscape. But what we do ask, as readers, is that the threshold matter somehow and that we are surprised and, perhaps, even changed when the story crosses it.

The Edge of Things, then, is an enticing title and a flexible one too, stretching to cover all manner of brinks. Characters cross the endlessly fascinating boundary between innocence and experience, naivety and self-knowledge, one sharing his first kiss at the company picnic, another beheading her first chicken.

What would infidelity look like? one story wonders, while another shows us what looks like cheating but turns out, in the flick of a needle, to be bridal branding instead. Worlds collide: matter-of-fact house renovations clang against soul-exchanges in one story while in another an empty house invites a range of intruders, from teenage lovers to lowering-the-tone buyers to symbolic creatures, recalling District 9, that challenge notions of inside and out.

Liesl Jobson’s “tips for super pics” apply with wit and pain to parent-child relationships, tracing shifts that the photographer protagonist catches out of the corner of her eye while her lens is trained elsewhere. Beatrice Lamwaka writes about a schoolgirl who wants to win a race on sports day. She has, after all, trained hard, fleeing rebel soldiers who abducted her. “I outran them so that’s an A+ for me. If anyone needs more practice in athletics, I’m sure it’s not me.”

Sometimes, an edge is sharp enough to draw blood. Then there’s literary edginess, fun with texts, intertextuality. Iconoclasm (“I don’t like Coetzee”) meets homage, for example, in Jeanne Hromnik’s exploration of new-South-African father figures both lecherous and pathetic. Perd Booysen amuses himself, and us too, with the device of the discovered journal, inadmissible as historical evidence because of its fictional finesse.

In David wa Maahlamela’s playful bus ride across the fiction/non-fiction frontier, we meet both Wordsetc and its editor, Phakama Mbonambi. In the optimistic view of the narrator, also called David, writers who describe lived experience “know exactly the impression they are intending to give their readers”. But this is perilous terrain for less adept scribes.

An event that bit your heart for real needs just as much construction on the page as a situation you make up from scratch. You can’t refer to that day, you must weave it, as Bernard Levinson does in “Tokai”. We have no idea whether the story draws on his life or his imagination or some alchemical meld of the two. What matters is that he shapes place, time and action so fully, so deftly that, like the narrator, we are moved by the mysterious intensity of the last scene.

The Edge of Things is in every sense a mixed bag. Alongside Levinson’s story, gems include Salafranca’s unforgettable image of a mother in an iron lung and Pravasan Pillay’s characters, dialogue and spicy small-canvas family drama.

Silke Heiss’s “Don’t Take Me for Free”, arguably Best in Show, nimbly outstrips our expectations. Like its trucker-clown narrator, Vonny, the story “was built to change”.

In Vonny’s extended appeal to her lover, “All-I-Have, Azar”, the  language is as elating as the ride across ostrich and canola country in a bright-eyed van “with its massive, roaring heart and load continuing to doer ’n gone”.

The collection’s subtitle – South African short fiction – proposes that we read the stories as a kind of national sampler. (In a one-off slip, the introduction makes an unwarranted claim to be presenting writing “on our continent”.) Clearly, South African fiction has moved beyond the imperative to be earnest, political or even particularly South African. Mischief is now acceptable story territory, while Fred de Vries’s chilling tale could take place in almost any big city and Aryan Kaganof’s junkies claim that Amsterdam may as well be Durban, “there’s no fucking difference. Bars are the same everywhere. Drugs are the same everywhere.” But it is also true that, as per Hromnik, “the past is hungry”.

Several stories tackle a mix of  race and privilege, either head-on or obliquely. In “Telephoning the Enemy”, for instance, Hans Pienaar crosses the “what if ?” line for an intriguing revisit of apartheid-era violence.

Solitude, as Salafranca notes in the introduction, features in many of the stories. We glimpse various anxious, closed, self-referential worlds. A man sits at a café table in the last story, telling himself consoling untruths and inking “NARCISSIST” into his crossword puzzle as he fends off contact.

What feels like a limitation, though, looking back over the collection, is neither inner landscapes nor low spirits (excellent fiction fodder) but rather a sense of stasis in some of the stories, a single note struck and held, Act 1 from curtain up to curtain down.

For these writers and for all the rest of us, Jenna Mervis’s story offers advice. Her protagonist “mentions nothing of … the fingernails of trees that have begun to tear at her corrugated roof in the night”. She looks for “a sign that … that the dangers outside have become manifest”. But by the end (and this won’t spoil it for you), she steps off the edge of the deck and plunges into the veld. Why not, writers? Instead of tamping down tension, why not let it explode? Approach the edge. Plunge. Leap.

REVIEWER: A Zimbabwean filmmaker and writer,  Annie Holmes has published short stories in the US and Zimbabwe and a short memoir, Good Red, in Canada. She co-edited, with Peter Orner, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. 

(Published in Wordsetc, Third Quarter 2011)

Voila! chatroom: an interview with Arja Salafranca, by Nikki Temkin

Arja Salafranca selected the short stories for The Edge of Things, a compilation of South African short stories. I chatted to her.

NIKKI:  What were the criteria for selection for The Edge of Things?
ARJA: Firstly, a story had to move and touch me, make me feel something, reflect on some aspects of life and our experiences here. Secondly, I was looking at excellence in terms of telling a story, well-crafted stories that begin with something deep inside and move readers because these were tales that just had to be told.

N: What was the inspiration for this book?
A: The book was initially meant to be an edition of the literary journal, Green Dragon. I received nearly 100 submissions and then selected the 24 stories that make up the anthology. It was too large for a journal, so I suggested that it become a special short fiction edition. I decided to do it because of my own love of the short story – as both a short story writer and as a prodigious reader of the genre.

N: Can you tell us about some of the themes of the book?
A: Some of the stories centre on solitude – and the ramifications of that, from loneliness, to a sense of fulfilment that also results from time spent alone, some centre on relationships experienced, some are about the outsider from society. Some of the stories explore the mother-daughter bond, some look at childhood experiences, some reach deep into South Africa’s past, looking at how those experiences have shaped those in the stories. Others look at identity issues in post-apartheid South Africa, and my own story deals with polio and the mother-daughter bond.

N: What do you think of South African writing currently?
A: It’s extremely vibrant and healthy – certainly in terms of the volume of fiction being produced, and we have some world-class writers, both established as well as emerging. South Africans are now so much more receptive to reading local literature – and there’s also such a range – from literary, to science fiction to crime thrillers and more.

N: Who are some of your favourite local authors?
A: I love Damon Galgut’s fierce, spare, almost uncompromising vision; David Medalie’s collection of short stories The Mistress’s Dog as well as Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Homing. I also love the poetry of Eva Bezwoda Royston (sadly she committed suicide in the 1970s). It’s personal, confessional poetry full of rich, dark and vivid imagery.


(Published in Voila!, Issue Number 8, 2011) 

Short story form challenges and inspires writers: a report by Leila Bloch on the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things

For an anthology of short stories, The Edge of Things includes both depth and scope, with several writers who seem (to varying degrees) unafraid of entering new literary territory. Published by Dye Hard Press, selected and edited by Arja Salafranca, these 24 stories are a special fiction edition of the literary journal Green Dragon.

At the launch, facilitated by Salafranca, a predominantly female group of writers clustered around a podium and steered the familiar how-and-why, question-and-answer session towards more spontaneous conversation. During the evening writers explained how they found inspiration while also skilfully adapting their writing to the short story format...Read more here

Arja Salafranca reports on the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things

Last Thursday night saw the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things, an anthology of South African short fiction selected by me and published by Dye Hard Press. This followed a month after the Jozi launch at Love Books in Melville.

Hosted by The Book Lounge, the launch was a chance for me to meet some of the Cape Town writers with whom I’d previously only had email dealings, as well as a chance to catch up with writing friends...Read more here

Podcast of Arja Salafranca interviewed about The Edge of Things

Arja Salafranca was interviewed by Sue Grant-Marshall about The Edge of Things on the Reading Matters programme for Radio Today on July 14th.  You can listen to the podcast of the interview here.

Kate Turkington reviews The Edge of Things

Short stories, as any writer knows, are possibly the most difficult literary form. In the space of a few pages, the storyteller must condense the thoughts, feelings and actions of his or her characters and then come to a conclusion. 

The Edge of Things (Dye Hard Press) edited by Arja Salafranca, herself an award-winning poet and short storyteller, gives us the best of contemporary South African writers. There are many themes with many twists.

The title story The Edge of Things by Jenna Mervis marries stark everyday South African reality to a wondrous fantasy. Arja’s own story The Iron Lung reminds us that imprisonment is not only physical but emotional and spiritual. The Company Christmas Party by Hamilton Wende is about that tender first love, and Mr Essop by Pravasan Pillay tells the story of a charming old Indian pensioner who rents a cottage on a friend’s property with unforeseen circumstances. The stories are dazzlingly diverse: funny, sad, thought-provoking and relevant. Keep them by your bed or in your bag for those school lift waits. 

Published on http://www.joburg.co.za/ here

Invite to the Cape Town launch of The Edge of Things, at The Book Lounge, July 28th

Loneliness a recurring theme in this collection: a review of The Edge of Things, by Gwen Podbrey

The short story has come back into its own over the past few years, possibly because time-strapped readers find them easier to manage than a lengthy novel.

This collection includes contributions from a remarkably diverse range of writers, including Gail Dendy, Jenna Mervis, Gillian Schutte and Jayne Bauling.

If there is one central theme to the book, it is alienation (or, to use real name, loneliness). The stories capture encounters and experiences which tilt us over into the cracks between the crevices of contemporary life: those dark, uncharted spaces where needs are failed by niceties, and pain and perdition walk hand in hand.

Pick of the crop – by a long way – is Bernard Levinson’s superb “Tokai”, which recounts his delivery of an Afrikaans couple, the Bezuidenhout’s, baby in the dead of night. But the birth is complicated and the womb goes into violent contractions, forcing him to manually secure it and staunch its gushing of  blood.

For hours he sits, his hand in the uterus of his semi-comatose patient, feeling this incubator of life convulse, enfold his fingers and relay to him its arcana.

“There was a slight shift of tempo. I listened with the fingers of my fist. Unmistakably, I heard the womb flutter and shift itself minutely over my fist... It stretched and gripped. Stretched again and squeezed my fist firmly. I inched my hand out. A secret dialogue between my hand and the womb. My blunt fist - mute and solid. The womb excited, chattering and intimately pressing and caressing my hand.”

Witnessing the drama of this birth - like the primordial one and, indeed, all births - Kleinman Bezuidenhout is engulfed in agony as acute as his wife’s. The next morning, Levinson - preparing to leave - sees him engaged in a ritual which matches, in every detail, the intensity and power of the previous night’s crisis.

The story is an unforgettable glimpse into the soul of the healer, whose patients’ trust in him can crucify as often as it coronates, and whose brief role in their lives - as an outsider, observing and intervening, but never sharing - carries a unique loneliness.

Later, in Liesl Jobson’s “You Pay for the View: Twenty Tips for Super Pics”, we enter the alienation of a compulsive photographer unable to fully engage with her life, and attempting instead to capture its essence through her lens “because the camera never lies”.

Yet it does, for it lacks the vocabulary to capture the truth of locations and individuals, how they  imbed themselves in the DNA of the soul and remain there forever, a testimony to life and loss. These are  not within the province of pixel and resolution, but of another documenting medium altogether.

The third exceptional story in the collection, Pravasan Pillay’s “Mr Essop”, recounts the arrival of a seemingly kindly, placid lodger at his parents’ home. The author, still a child, notes the growing friendship between the boarder (Mr Essop) and his father - both lonely men - and their mutual pleasure at discovering the values they have in common. But when Essop suddenly shows a brutal side to his nature, shock is added to disappointment.

Aryan Kaganof’s “Same Difference” explores yet another kind of alienation: that of drug users, whose subculture and exclusion from mainstream society force them to band together, unwillingly recognising in each other kindred tortured spirits and putting on a show of bravado to conceal their desperation.

In this ugly, treacherous world, the only allegiances which matter, last as long as it takes to shoot up a crystal meth hit.

“The upstairs toilets are for blowjobs and the schnarf sessions. The outside toilets are for quick shags and schnarf sessions … Tretchikoff girls clustered on the walls and in the mirror. Looking down serenely on the useless lives of all the pastel customers. Useless, all of it. Useless.”

As the narrator ends yet another all-night session with his gang of users in the fetid, filthy basement of a nightclub, and the sun announces the break of yet another unwelcome day, he reflects: “I’m frightened. I’m lonely. Sometimes I feel close to death. But at least I scored tonight… There is no reason to stay alive. But I refuse to bribe the reaper to come and take me.”

Hans Pienaar’s contribution, Telephoning the Enemy”, makes a brave, but failed, effort to explore the alienation of white, apartheid-bound South Africans on the verge of political change. As bombs hidden in sidewalk garbage cans claim one civilian victim after another during the early 1980s, racist beliefs are heightened and the gap between terrorist and victim appears unbreachable.

Not all the stories have the gravitas or compositional skill to sustain the reader’s interest. Angelina N Sithebe’s cumbersome, melodramatic and poorly structured “Sepia”, for example, features characters who are utterly implausible, while Rosemund Handler’s “Clueless” exhumes a stale, clichéd story line: white, lonely madam coming on to a man across the colour bar, followed by a delicious explosion of eroticism and new awareness of each other as human beings. Hardly groundbreaking stuff.

Still, with 22 out of 24 stories offering piercing insights and showcasing a range of exciting writing talent, the collection is one of the best to emerge in recent years. Salafranca’s eloquent and moving foreword whet one’s appetite for the feast to come and the contributors’ profiles at the back of the book give perspective to the voices on the pages, which demand - and deserve - an audience.

(Published in SA Jewish Report, July 8, 2001) 

Short but rich South African view - a review of The Edge of Things by Jane Rosenthal

Two collections of short stories illustrate why the genre continues to garner accolades for the country

The Edge of Things: South African short fiction, selected by Arja Salafranca, Dye Hard Press

African Pens 2011, Jacana

Though they may have been somewhat neglected in recent years, there is a long tradition of short stories in South African fiction. Some of the most famous writers are Pauline Smith, Can Themba and Dan Jacobson; more recently Ivan Vladislavic, David Medalie and Zoe Wicomb spring to mind. Practitioners of this form were hard at work last year if one judges by the two collections reviewed here. As with literary awards for fiction, it's a matter of some chance as to what appears in any given year and 2010 seems to have been particularly good.

Arja Salafranca originally intended The Edge of Things to be a special short-fiction edition of the journal Green Dragon, but as she had so many submissions, it became a full-length book. This interesting and wide-ranging selection reflects the richness of the South African experience. It begins with several pieces that delineate the complexities of personal relationships, including mothers and daughters, dysfunctional marriages and the interior lives of women - all situations in which the protagonists seem to be sailing close to the edge of things.

The title piece, The Edge of Things by Jenna Mervis, is a particularly fine story about a woman and her dog, alone in a remote place, which is beset by fear and fantasy.

Other strong but even darker pieces include Tokai by Bernard Levinson, a brooding, sexualised and masculien take on birth; Telephoning the Enemy by Hans Pienaar recounts the effects of a bomb on a conservative Pretoria community; and in Solitude Dan Wylie an isolated coffee-drinker who enjoys crossword puzzles observes the lives of others from the periphery. Margie Orford's The Gift is an erotic and original meditation on freedom and commitment. Its contrast to these, Hamilton Wende's The Company Christmas Party evokes adolescents careening uncertainly but cheerfully into adulthood. 

Pravasan Pillay's Mr Essop is a precise cameo of language and life in Chatsworth, in which the protagonist at first appears to be the perfect tenant.

Although there are a few less felicitious inclusions, the standard is remarably sustained. Most memorable would probably be Silke Heiss's Don't Take Me for Free, narrated by Vonny, a woman whose hold on her job as a furniture-van driver, and on her sometimes man, Azar, is extremely tenuous. This unusual story asserts the humanity of the homeless, poor and underemployed. For Vonny and Azar the stabilising symbol  of their lives is a carved piece of cedar wood. This item,made by Azar, is as abitrary as fate but is seen as a spine and a road that helps to hold them. Poetic and deep, Vonny's strange existence imprints itself on the reader's mind.

The 500 stories originally submitted for African Pens 2011 were read and shortlisted to 21 by variuous volunteers (PEN readers and an editorial board) before being judged by JM Coetzee. Although Coetzee considers the standard of this year's entries to be "generally higher", he said that "the kind of short story writer we are all hoping that an award of this magnitude will attract - the newcomer with naked talent, a feel for language and a fresh vision of the world - stubbornly fails to arrive".

I thought this a little stringent  - there is plenty of "naked talent" and "feel for language" - and even considerable "fresh vision". Stories that particularly show "fresh vision" would include Claremont Park  (Bobby Jordan), Pinch (Martin Hatchuel) and Evolution (Jayne Bauling).

Jordan's story takes one deep into the experience of people on the fringes of Cape Town society in a lyrically light and accepting way not seen by this reader before. Pinch could be a sidebar to Deneys Reitz's great classic about the South African Anglo-Boer War, Commando, with an entirely unexpected flare, both tender and brutal. In Evolution Bauling takes the reader to a place where our existence as the dominant primate species is challenged, perhaps deservedly so. In these three we have fresh visions of the present, past and future.

The winning story, The Story, by James Whyle, is a gem. Set in Pringle Bay, it has more than one narrative layered into its cleanly written pages and concerns a man, his driver's licence, a cop, a baboon and several "whatifs".  In second place is Heatwave by Beth Hunt, in which a woman, surrounded by love and good fortune, examines her conscience when a lover dies.

Of the 21 stories I considered 15 to be very good - and the rest to be almost as good. Names that are already known to readers include Liesl Jobson, with her intense, perceptive style, and Sarah Lotz, whose The Pigeon Fancier is funny as well as sad.

Both these collections of short fiction are not to be missed and contain stories that will join the ranks of the established tradition.

(Published in Mail & Guardian, July 8 2011)