Yewande Omotoso • Mandla Langa • Karen Jennings • Simon van Schalkwyk • Masiyaleti Mbewe • Wamuwi Mbao • Werner Pretorius • Niq Mhlongo • Finuala Dowling • Makhosazana Xaba • Saaleha Idrees Bamjee • Ivan Vladislavić • Nthato Mokgata • Roohi Choudhry • Anna Stroud • Joan Metelerkamp • Niren Tolsi • Hedley Twidle • Samuel Fury Childs Daly • Kirsten Perkins • Corina van der Spoel • Jennifer Malec • Victor Dlamini • Tymon Smith
Welcome to the fourth issue of Volume 8 of The Johannesburg Review of Books!
In our correspondence towards this issue, writer and cultural activist Mandla Langa suggested we share an exhortation by Toni Morrison in which she addresses herself to the brokenness of the world. ‘We are living in the most dangerous period of our lives,’ he said. In 2015, in an essay for The Nation, Morrison addressed how to do creative work ‘in times of dread’:
‘This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.’
This year, we have compiled a fiction issue with a difference—that difference being the inclusion of non-fiction. The years just keep getting stranger, and truth is stranger than fiction, after all.
Here’s the complete breakdown of Vol. 8, Issue 4, which you will also find on our issue archive page:
Review
Interviews
- ‘Johannesburg provokes extreme responses, one way or the other, because it’s full of contradictions’—An interview with Ivan Vladislavic about his new book The Near North
- ‘Poetry has always been a way for me to process life’—Saaleha Idrees Bamjee in conversation with Makhosazana Xaba
Poetry
Works in progress
- Read ‘The Underwhelm of Bijou Benjamine’, an excerpt from a work in progress by Yewande Omotoso
- ‘Even as I thought about my brothers, I felt this distance from them, from their spirits; they were abstract beings, as remote as characters in a dream’—An excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Mandla Langa
- ‘Come the first of December the chains will be broken for good’—Read an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by Karen Jennings
Short stories
- Read ‘Antlers’, new short fiction by Simon van Schalkwyk
- Read ‘Details’, new short fiction by Wamuwi Mbao
- Read ‘Die Voorkamer’, new short fiction by Werner Pretorius
- Read ‘Dog’s Life’, new short fiction by Niq Mhlongo
Creative non-fiction
- Read ‘Father Father Void Father Void Void Father’, new creative non-fiction by Masiyaleti Mbewe
- Ambiguous utopias—Hedley Twidle salutes Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed on its 50th anniversary
Novel excerpts
- Grab whatever warm slice of life you can before it turns on you—Read an excerpt from Nthato Mokgata’s debut novel Ghost in the Drum
- ‘My pilgrimage to Durban was written before I was born’—Read an excerpt from Roohi Choudhry’s forthcoming debut novel Outside Women
- ‘I don’t go home for the funeral. Except, perhaps I do …’ Read an excerpt from Anna Stroud’s debut novel Who Looks Inside
Non-fiction
- Taking Guard in Inner-city Johannesburg—Read an excerpt from Niren Tolsi’s new book Writing Around the Wicket: Race, Class and History in South African Cricket
- ‘In Africa, the conservative realism of the military mind met the liberatory spirit of the decolonising mind’—Read an excerpt from Soldier’s Paradise by Samuel Fury Childs Daly
- One Hundred Years of Book Covers—Read an excerpt from Publishing from the South: A Century of Wits University Press
Photography
Music
The JRB Daily
- Gabrielle Mudiwa awarded inaugural Achmat Dangor Literary Prize
- Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker Prize for her ‘compact yet beautifully expansive’ novel Orbital
- 2024 South African Literary Awards winners announced
- Jonny Steinberg and Andrew Brown win the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards