That Reminds Me


Derek Owusu - 2019
    He grows up in fields and woods, and he is happy, he thinks. When K is eleven, the city reclaims him. He returns to an unknown mother and a part-time father, trading the fields for flats and a community that is alien to him. Slowly, he finds friends. Eventually, he finds love. He learns how to navigate the city. But as he grows, he begins to realise that he needs more than the city can provide. He is a man made of pieces. Pieces that are slowly breaking apart.That Reminds Me is the story of one young man, from birth to adulthood, told in fragments of memory. It explores questions of identity, belonging, addiction, sexuality, violence, family and religion. It is a deeply moving and completely original work of literature from one of the brightest British writers of today.

I'm Too Young To Be Seventy


Judith Viorst - 2005
     Fans of Judith Viorst's funny, touching, and wise poems about turning thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty will love this new volume for the woman who deeply believes she is too young to be seventy, "too young in my heart and my soul, if not in my thighs." Viorst explores, among the many other issues of this stage of life, the state of our sex lives and teeth, how we can stay married though thermostatically incompatible, and the joys of grandparenthood and shopping. Readers will nod with rueful recognition when she asks, "Am I required to think of myself as a basically shallow woman because I feel better when my hair looks good?," when she presses a few helpful suggestions on her kids because "they may be middle aged, but they're still my children," and when she graciously -- but not too graciously -- selects her husband's next mate in a poem deliciously subtitled "If I Should Die Before I Wake, Here's the Wife You Next Should Take." Though Viorst acknowledges she is definitely not a good sport about the fact that she is mortal, her poems are full of the pleasures of life right now, helping us come to terms with the passage of time, encouraging us to keep trying to fix the world, and inviting us to consider "drinking wine, making love, laughing hard, caring hard, and learning a new trick or two as part of our job description at seventy." I'm Too Young to Be Seventy is a joy to read and makes a heartwarming gift for anyone who has reached or is soon to reach that -- it's not so bad after all -- seventh decade.

Glottal Stop


Paul Celan - 2000
    A collection of poetry by the German poet whose parents were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and who eventually committed suicide features essays on Jewish heritage and alienation.

The Best of Betjeman


John Betjeman - 1978
    In addition to the best of Sir John's poetry, this acclaimed selection includes prose that reveals him as architectural critic, social historian conservationist, short story writer, railway enthusiast, country lover, humorist, eccentric and christian.

Steinheist: Markus Jooste, Steinhoff & SA's biggest corporate fraud


Rob Rose - 2018
    When this investors’ darling was exposed as a house of cards, tales of fraudulent accounting, a lavish lifestyle involving multimillion-rand racehorses and ructions in the ‘Stellenbosch mafia’ made headlines around the world. As regulators tally up the cost, 'Financial Mail' editor Rob Rose reveals the real inside story behind Steinhoff. Based on dozens of interviews with key players in South Africa, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands – and documents not yet public – Steinheist reveals: how Bruno Steinhoff formed the company by doing business in the Communist bloc and apartheid South Africa; how the ‘Markus myth’ started in the dusty streets of Ga-Rankuwa and grew thanks to a ‘bit of luck’ in a 1998 takeover; how Jooste insiders shifted nasty liabilities off Steinhoff’s balance sheet to secretive companies overseas in order to present a false picture of the profits; how Wiese was lucky to lose only R59bn and how Shoprite narrowly escaped getting caught in Steinhoff’s web; and what happened behind closed boardroom doors in the frantic week before Jooste resigned.

A Question of Power


Bessie Head - 1973
    If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy who was a native." It is never clear to Elizabeth whether the mission school principal's cruel revelation of her origins is at the bottom of her mental breakdown. She has left South Africa with her son and is living in the village of Motabeng, the place of sand, in Botswana where there are no street lights at night. In the darkness of this country where people turn and look at her with vague curiosity as an outsider she establishes an entirely abnormal relationship with two men. A mind-bending book which takes the reader in and out of sanity.

Known and Strange Things: Essays


Teju Cole - 2016
    The collection will include pre-published essays that have gone viral, like “The White Industrial Savior Complex,” first published in The Atlantic.

The Tree House


Kathleen Jamie - 2004
    In The Tree House Jamie argues - as Burns did before her - for an engagement of the whole being through a kind of practical earthly spirituality. These often startling encounters with animals, birds, and other humans propose a way of living which recognises the earth as home to many different consciousnesses -- and a means of authentic engagement with 'this, the only world'. Together they form one of the most powerful poetic statements of recent years.

Great Sonnets


Paul NegriJohn Keats - 1994
    Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Longfellow, Yeats, Frost, Poe, etc. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

The Madonna of Excelsior


Zakes Mda - 2004
    Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of one irrepressible fallen madonna, Niki, and her family, at the heart of the scandal.

Meow Said the Cow


Sarah Mazor - 2018
    

Why Sell Tacos in Africa?: 16 life-changing business strategies you can use anywhere, from the man who turned $400 into $200 million


Paul Oberschneider - 2016
    There is no A-to-Z path, and there are no magic beans that will carry you upward overnight. Have you ever wondered how to start, scale up, build teams, and flourish in an uncontested market? I can tell you. I did it. In 1992, I landed in Estonia with $400 in my pocket. There, I discovered a truth that changed my life and the way I conducted business: You can make a lot of money as an entrepreneur by moving decisively in blue-sky markets - markets where you face very little competition and the tide can carry you to riches.Over the next decade and a half, I built a portfolio of businesses worth $200 million. Now, I want to share the paths that led me to success, passing on my knowledge to you. In Why Sell Tacos in Africa? I explain sixteen principles that allowed me to drive such tremendous growth. May you, too, find a blue-market and watch your business soar.

Book of Anonymous Letters


AMKA Publishing - 2021
    Real people. Real stories.

Addictarium


Nicole D'Settēmi - 2016
    Sex. Detox. Art. Recovery. Prostitution. Music. Street life. Poetry. Toxic love. And, those are just on the surface. The layers and complexities of Addictarium will shock and enthrall you... When wild-child, and south Florida escapee, Danielle Martino finds herself curled in a ball on the cold tile floors of her filthy rank bathroom in the tiny studio she rents with her fiancé and partner-in-crime, she knows it's time to quit abusing heroin. Severely impaired from shooting a bad batch of black tar heroin, and already partially blind from the infection that the muddy poison has caused, she is forced to hitch a greyhound bus to New York City, and to abandon her care-free, American-bohemian, drug infested life-style.Hailed by many as a beautiful, unique, honest, raw and poetic account of recovery, Addictarium takes readers on a compelling journey through the life and eyes of the narrator; a creative, nomadic, deep--but, incidentally broken--young woman, and underlines the contributing factors to what it's really like to suffer from addiction. With magnificent candor--and sometimes emotionally crippling descriptions--we witness Danielle's fight towards recovery from more than just heroin, as Addictarium brings the readers on a fascinating and harrowing, brutal tale of a young women's recovery from total and mass self-destruction. --Addictarium highlights in the starkest of lights, why it is so difficult for addicts to receive the recovery they seek, when they finally do decide to put the drug down.

Crossing the Congo: Over Land and Water in a Hard Place


Mike Martin - 2016
    Traversing 2,500 miles of the toughest terrain on the planet in a twenty-five year-old Land Rover, they faced repeated challenges, from kleptocracy and fire ants to non-existent roads and intense suspicion from local people. Through imagination and teamwork -- including building rafts and bridges, conducting makeshift surgery in the jungle and playing tribal politics -- they got through. But the Congo is raw, and the journey took an unexpected psychological toll on them all. Crossing the Congo is an offbeat travelogue, a story of friendship and what it takes to complete a great journey against tremendous odds, and an intimate look into one of the world's least-developed and most fragile states, told with humor and sensitivity.