AfricaSouth Africa

A much needed corrective to the literary canon’s rural bias—Timothy Wright reviews Claiming the City in South African Literature by Meg Samuelson

Timothy Wright reviews Meg Samuelson’s new book, Claiming the City in South African Literature, which argues that only through writing…

Academic

‘Lines and images stick in the mind years after they have been heard or read’—Read Ivan Vladislavić’s Introduction to My Mother’s Laughter, a new collection of poems by the late Chris van Wyk

The JRB presents an excerpt from My Mother’s Laughter: Selected Poems by Chris van Wyk, edited by Ivan Vladislavić and…

Academic

‘A literary con’—Hedley Twidle rereads Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost by Dugmore Boetie, the joker in the pack of Sophiatown-era life writing

In this excerpt from his forthcoming book on non-fiction in South African literature, Experiments with Truth, Hedley Twidle revisits Dugmore…