The Johannesburg Review of Books Vol. 9, Issue 2 (August 2025)

Zanta Nkumane • Shayera Dark • Wamuwi Mbao • Karen Jennings • Makhosazana Xaba • Thabile Makue • Rustum Kozain • Hedley Twidle • Sarah Uheida • Mariama Bâ • Pravasan Pillay • Alex La Guma • Nicky Falkof • Hannah J Dawson • André Odendaal • Roger Field • Mehita Iqani • Renugan Raidoo • Tymon Smith • Elleke Boehmer • Tanya Zack • Victor Dlamini • Jennifer Malec

Welcome to the second issue of Volume 9 of The Johannesburg Review of Books!

In this issue, Zanta Nkumane reviews Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness, finding it to be a novel not intent on building a new national myth, but mourning the debris of the old one. Shayera Dark reviews the newly published reissue of My Country, Africa, a book that validates Andrée Blouin’s place in the pantheon of African revolutionaries. Wamuwi Mbao reviews Blood’s Inner Rhyme by Antjie Krog, a book preoccupied with a lifelong, struggling conversation between a mother possessed by the fever of Afrikanerdom, and a daughter who spent her life abhorring it.

In our interviews section, The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec chats to Karen Jennings about her latest novel, Crooked Seeds, and making your reader’s skin crawl. We also have Thabile Makue in conversation with Makhosazana Xaba in the ninth in a series of long-form interviews focusing on contemporary poetry collections by Black women and non-binary poets.

In our poetry corner, we share new work by the Rustum Kozain. We also present an excerpt from Not This Tender, a mythical yet deeply personal new collection by Libyan-born poet Sarah Uheida.

In our survey of new and forthcoming fiction, we present excerpts from a new edition of Mariama Ba’s seminal novel So Long a Letter and Ice Shock, the new novel by Elleke Boehmer.

In non-fiction, we present Hedley Twidle‘s Introduction to the exciting new collection The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction, as well as Mehita Iqani and Renugan Raidoo‘s Introduction to Johannesburg from the Riverbanks: Navigating the Jukskei—the first book to look critically at the river’s role in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city. We also feature an exclusive first look at The Devil Made Me Do It: Understanding Occult Crime in South Africa by Nicky Falkof. Elsewhere in the issue, dip into The Early Writings of Alex La Guma: Reflections on Cultcha, Identity and Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s; Tanya Zack’s much anticipated new book The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City; and Pravasan Pillay’s offbeat new food memoir Curry and Bread.