Chops Chutney

 

We had chops chutney for supper last night, and 'Chops Chutney' is also the title of the final story in Pravasan Pillay's collection, Chatsworth.

Why not buy a copy at Made in Durban?

Extract from the short story 'Mr Essop' in Pravasan Pillay's collection Chatsworth

The cottage remained empty for two months before Mr Essop moved in. Mr Essop was a friend of my father’s cousin Prega.

Uncle Prega, who was seventeen years older than my father, had known the seventy-two-year-old pensioner for all his life. Both were originally from Renishaw, a small town on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal.

Mr Essop had worked as a sugarcane-field labourer in Pongola for much of his early life before opening a fruit and vegetable store, which he ran with his wife. After his wife died of cancer in 1986, he sold his house and business and moved to Durban to live with his son.

Uncle Prega said Mr Essop had grown to hate living under the same roof as his son and daughter-in-law. He said that they trea­ted the pensioner as if he were a child, forcing him to go to bed at eight each night and taking control of all his money. He wanted to get away from them and had asked Uncle Prega for help.

This was when Uncle Prega approached my father. He came on a Saturday afternoon.

“He got nowhere to go,” Uncle Prega said. He had brought a bottle of brandy along and my father and him had worked their way through two-thirds of it. “We can’t let a good man like him die in such a house. That’s not the kind of house you must go in.”

“For true,” my father replied. He had already agreed an hour before to rent the cottage to Mr Essop, and the two of them now seemed to be chewing through the decision. My father unscre­wed the bottle of brandy and poured a double for himself and Uncle Prega, and then he motioned at me to top up their glasses with Coke.

“You know when I was growing up in Renishaw, that ballie was like a big una to me –” Uncle Prega said, before stopping and addressing me, and, at the same time, tipping up the Coke bottle neck with his forefinger. “That’s enough, boy.”

I poured the same amount into my father’s glass before sit­ting down behind them.

Uncle Prega continued: “After Apa died, Mr Essop should help us like we his own. Every month end, when he should come from Pongola he should always bring back something to give to Auma. Never mind, it was a parcel sugar, or packet biscuit, or tea leaf or few metres material, small things, you know, but he shouldn’t forget about us.”

“A gentleman,” my father replied, taking a sip of his brandy.

“That’s it, a gentleman,” Uncle Prega said. “And, plus, must know, when big aka needed train fare to come to Durban for teachers’ college he was the one to give the money. Just like that, no questions. This man was only our neighbour, but he should treat us like we his family. If I had a place in my house, I should take him in tomorrow.”

“He got a place here, don’t worry about that,” my father rep­lied, knocking his glass against Uncle Prega’s ...

*************************

Pravasan Pillay's Chatsworth is available from Made in Durban.

A mouthful of secrets

 

Who was Sinclair Beiles? available from David Krut Bookstores

Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African beat poet edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, is available from David Krut Bookstores.

It contains essays, interviews and memoirs by writers such as Gary Cummiskey, Eva Kowalska, Alan Finlay, Heathcote Williams, Carl Weissner, Fred Malan and dawie malan.

Odd Interview with Richard Fox

Gary Cummiskey's interview with South African poet Richard Fox in the latest issue of The Odd Magazine can be accessed directly here.

Oddity 23 is out!

 The latest issue of The Odd Magazine is out!

Please enjoy the issue at: https://theoddmagazine.wixsite.com/oddity-23

In it you can read:

Odd Poetry: Angelline Schellenberg, Gordon Meade, Ivan de Monbrison, Mathew Friday and rob plath

Odd Shorts: Catfish McDaris, Glen Armstrong, Keith Hoerner, Liam Pezzano, Mark Russo and Peter Cherches. All stories are illustrated by Lizzy Campbell

Odd Art: Enrico Artis, Paul Warren, Lizzy Campbell

Odd Interview: Richard Fox interviewed by Gary Cummiskey

Enjoy!

Outside the cave at Clarke's Books

 

Gary Cummiskey's selected poems, Outside the cave, is available also at Clarke's Books in Long Street, Cape Town.

You can order online or pop in and buy a copy in person!

The fool on the hill

 

Never nevermind release

 

Kiss me tonight, Lady Rachel

 

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