The Johannesburg Review of Books Vol. 2, Issue 7 (July 2018)

Welcome to the seventh issue of Volume 2 of The Johannesburg Review of Books.

This month, we’re delighted to publish the winning stories from this year’s Short Story Day Africa Prize: Tochukwu Emmanuel Okafor’s winning story ‘All Our Lives’, and the joint second place winners, Agazit Abate’s ‘The Piano Player’ and Michael Yee’s ‘God Skin’. We also have an interview with Okafor about his win, and his writing life.

In tribute to David Goldblatt, who passed away in June, the cover image for the July 2018 issue of The JRB is his photograph ‘Hillbrow, June 1972’, excerpted from his solo exhibition and accompanying book TJ (published in 2011 by Umuzi).

This July marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart. To commemorate the occasion, Lebohang Mojapelo reviews Terri Ochiagha’s new book Achebe and Friends at Umuahia: The Making of a Literary Elite, which places Achebe among his contemporaries.

Wamuwi Mbao reviews Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, recently reissued fourteen years after its first publication, finding its heated restlessness undiminished. In our Francophone section, Efemia Chela reviews Anne Garréta’s newly translated memoir, Not One Day, the second of her books to be translated into English.

Argentine author Mariana Enriquez, who will be at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September, sits down with Bongani Kona to talk about the aftermath of Argentina’s violent past and her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire, while The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec chats to Harry Kalmer about his recent Barry Ronge Fiction Prize win, for his first English novel A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg.

In a penetrating and incisive essay, Mbali Sikakana considers Nozizwe Cynthia Jele’s new novel The Ones With Purpose in the context of Hilton Als’s groundbreaking 1996 sociopolitical manifesto The Women.

In our poetry section this month, we feature three previously unpublished poems by Kenyan poet Bethuel Muthee, while from our Photo Editor Victor Dlamini, feast your eyes on original portraits of Imraan Coovadia and TJ Dema.

Finally, City Editor Niq Mhlongo turns the focus onto South Africa’s cultural game-changers—the book clubs that are changing the literary landscape.

Enjoy the issue, and let us know what you think on Facebook or Twitter.

Here’s the complete breakdown of Vol. 2, Issue 7, which you will also find on our issue archive page:

Reviews

Interviews

Essays

Poetry