With the Safety Off at reduced price!

 

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

We are offering the book at a reduced price of R60 per copy. Courier to your door is R100, so R160 altogether.

Email cummiskeyg@gmail.com to order.

Some have called it shocking, obscene and offensive ....

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 in South Africa within 24 hours (excepting weekends) for a total of R260.00.

Email dyehardpress@gmail.com to order!

Copies of With the Safety Off by Graeme Feltham still available

 

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!

The Fall by Hans Pienaar is still available

 

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

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!

Newly published by altoviolet and Dye Hard Press: The Fall by Hans Pienaar

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

 

With the safety off ... just three copies left!

There are just three copies left of this controversial novel by the late Graeme Feltham. Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com for order details.

 

With the Safety Off ... only six copies left

 

There are only six copies left of Graeme Feltham's posthumously published With the Safety Off. This was a limited edition and will not be reprinted.

Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

And then there were six ....

There are now only six copies of Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off in stock.

Contact Dye Hard Press at dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order. 

An extract from 'Mr Essop', from Pravasan Pillay's collection Chatsworth

 

An extract from 'Mr Essop':

Three years after we moved into our house in Chatsworth, my father built a granny cottage on the property. He said that once the cottage was rented out, it would bring in an additional R800 a month to our household.

The cottage was small – a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen – but clean and comfortable by the standards of township outbuildings, most of which were damp, poorly constructed hovels. The most unique part of the building was its veranda. It was a two-by-three-metre space, with a tiled floor, bordered by cement balustrades, and covered by a blue corrugated-plastic roof.

Despite the builder’s advice that such a small building didn’t warrant a veranda, my father insisted on adding it. His reasoning was that it would set the cottage apart from all the other outbuildings being let out across the neighbourhood.

When the cottage was ready for its first tenant, my father placed an ad in the classifieds of the Chatsworth Sun. It took him almost a week to compose it.

“We must be careful,” he cautioned my mother, the night before phoning it into the newspaper. “We don’t want to rent to katchara people. You meet anyone first time, they act nice in front of you, but, must see, two months later, they don’t want to pay their rent.”

From Chatsworth by Pravasan Pillay, a collection of 11 short stories that highlight working class life in a residential area that was allocated for South Africans of Indian descent during apartheid. The stories take place in the recent past and bring to life the nuances of life in this community, without leaning into stereotypes.

Available at www.madeinchatsworth.co.za.

Thunder and Safety reaches Mpumalanga

Good to see that Gakwi Mashego in Shatale, Mpumalanga, has received his copies of Thunder on the highway by Gary Cummiskey and With the Safety Off by Graeme Feltham.

With the safety off, by Graeme Feltham

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

Wanna be shocked? Offended? Froth at the mouth?

Looking for a book that will shock you? Offend you?Get you frothing at the mouth? But even so, still having the makings of an underground classic?

Then Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off might be just for you.

The novel is set in Yeoville, Johannesburg, 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.

With introductions by Luke Feltham and James de Villiers.

220 pp.

ISBN 978-0-9869982-6-3

Available directly from Dye Hard Press. If you live in South Africa, the book can be courier to your door for R260.00.

Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com to order.

'Gone, gone' on altoviolet

One of my short stories from my collection Off-ramp appears on the altoviolet website.

Title 'Gone, gone', it is a crazy one (actually they are all crazy) about a journal who meets up with Patti Smith in Johannesburg.

You can read it here.

With the Safety off at Clarkes' Books' in Cape Town

Wonderful to see Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off listed on the catalogue of Clarkes Books' in Cape Town.

Looking forward to the end of lockdown when we can get back to doing normal things like order hardcopy books!

With the Safety Off in Rosebank!

Exclusive Books Rosebank has ordered copies of Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off, so they should be on the shelves soon! Go check them out! The book is also available directly from Dye Hard Press - email dyehardpress@iafrica.com for order details.

Graeme Feltham would have been 55 years old today

I often wonder what Graeme would have thought of With the Safety Off. I aimed to produce something that I hoped he would have been proud of.

With the Safety Off reaches Unisa

Dawie Malan, subject librarian at Unisa, is enjoying reading his copy of Graeme Feltham's With the Safety Off.

Why not order a copy yourself? Send an email to dyehardpress@iafrica.com for details. Also available at select bookstores.

More news on With the Safety Off

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.