[The JRB Daily] Top 10 of 2019—A look back at our most popular articles of the year
This December marked the The JRB’s thirty-second issue, the final issue of our third volume. With the new year—but not…
This December marked the The JRB’s thirty-second issue, the final issue of our third volume. With the new year—but not…
Between Baldwin, the world and the Old South—Wamuwi Mbao reviews The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Water DancerTa-Nehisi CoatesHamish…
Richard Poplak reviews The Night Trains by Charles van Onselen, a book grounded in the hard work of scouring the…
Zadie Smith, the accomplished, experimental New Yorker—The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec reviews Grand Union. Grand UnionZadie SmithHamish Hamilton, 2019 Read an…
The JRB Francophone and Contributing Editor Efemia Chela travels to Ethiopia with the living archive of Maaza Mengiste’s novel, The Shadow King. The…
Lidudumalingani reviews Everything is a Deathly Flower by Maneo Mohale, finding it to be a succession of powerful moments. Everything…
In Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino presents her cosmopolitan obsessions with piercing insight and authority, writes Khanya Mtshali. Trick…
The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec reviews Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel American Spy, a thriller that exposes the human drama that plays out…
With prose that sparkles and pops, Rémy Ngamije’s The Eternal Audience of One is a millennial novel that intricately traces…
Fantastic Returns and Where to Find Them—The JRB Francophone and Contributing Editor Efemia Chela travels to Liberia with Wayétu Moore’s…
Moshibudi Motimele reflects on the publication of Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000–2018, a…
On Paulin Hountondji’s Universalist philosophy—Sanya Osha reviews Paulin Hountondji: African Philosophy as Critical Humanism, by Franziska Dubgen and Stefan Skupien….
The Nickel Boys is a powerfully controlled novel in which the main character learns that there are no rules by…
The Troubled Times of Magrieta Prinsloo by Ingrid Winterbach offers us one of the most chilling and fearless portraits of…
In Beyond Babylon, by Igiaba Scego, migrants come to rebuild their lives in the midst of ruins, writes Francophone and…
In Travellers, Helon Habila delivers a riveting novel that unfolds as a tribute to displaced people and stands as a…
A novel of feminist radicalism, readable in the best sense of the word—Wamuwi Mbao reviews Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, who will be…
A significant first step in documenting the life writing of black Zimbabwean women—The JRB Contributing Editor Panashe Chigumadzi reviews Township Girls:…
Tracing the memory of bones, ‘a long thread of words that attempted to fulfil the universe’—Lara Buxbaum reviews The Old…
Zanta Nkumane reviews Ocean Vuong’s devastatingly beautiful debut On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel about living in the margins,…
In Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan appears to have offered us an alternative history that leads to the same dispiriting…
Contributing Editor Bongani Madondo unmoors Kwame Brathwaite’s Black Is Beautiful from mono-dimensional notions of the Black Atlantic into a New African Globalism of…
Celebrating Africa’s Philosopher-King—Adekeye Adebajo reviews Building Blocks Towards an African Century: Essays in Honour of Thabo Mbeki. Building Blocks Towards an…
Imraan Coovadia reviews Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s new book, Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture. Pieter-Louis Myburgh Gangster State: Unravelling…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall by Adam Habib, finding it engrossing, but ultimately unconvincing. Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall…
Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a frustrating could’ve, would’ve, should’ve affair, although it may yet prove to be the beginning…
Wamuwi Mbao reviews Diana Evans’s novel Ordinary People, which has been longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction….
In this excerpt from his forthcoming book on non-fiction in South African literature, Experiments with Truth, Hedley Twidle revisits Dugmore…
James Baldwin’s novel of half a century ago, If Beale Street Could Talk, now reissued by Penguin Random House, was…
The JRB Poetry Editor Rustum Kozain reviews David Austin’s new book Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, finding…
Lebohang Mojapelo reviews Ngũgĩ: Reflections on His Life of Writing, a collection of essays that reflects on the life and work of Ngũgĩ…
The List, the debut novel by former anti-apartheid activist and uMkhonto weSizwe member Barry Gilder, is a meditation about betrayal, faith,…
Contrary to what the title and pulpy cover seem to suggest, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite is…
As Bongani Madondo experienced tinges of nostalgia occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, HipHop Feminist…
In La Bastarda we find a revolutionary piece of literature, where a young girl isn’t saved by her long-lost father,…
Sally Rooney reshapes our understanding of the ordinary in a manner that invites us to imagine better ways of being,…
Constructed around a feminist, though dystopian, future, Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Who Fears Death—now reissued some eight years after its first…
It’s a strange time to be writing a comedy of manners about moneyed New Yorkers, but Patrick deWitt’s French Exit…
In his debut work of fiction, The Night of Broken Glass, Feroz Rather masterfully captures the peculiar, punctured lives of…
The JRB Editor Jennifer Malec reviews Esi Edugyan’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Washington Black. Washington Black Esi Edugyan Serpent’s Tail, 2018 Esi…