Book picks similar to
The prophetess by Njabulo S. Ndebele


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short-stories

Lights Out: a horror short story


Darcy Coates - 2015
    Inside are eight boxes waiting to be picked up by Jodie, the store manager. But something's not quite right about the delivery. Jodie can sense it as soon as she touches the large, coffin-shaped crates: something unnatural and dangerous is stored inside. Almost as soon as the crates are brought into the store, things start to go wrong. Customers seem reluctant to linger. Clothes are thrown off the racks during the middle of the night. And Jodie's co-workers stop answering their phones. As a deadly storm grows on the horizon, Jodie begins to realise just how dangerous the unknown can be.

Electric Arches


Eve L. Ewing - 2017
    Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant: a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.

Agaat


Marlene van Niekerk - 2006
    As she struggles to communicate with her maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat, the complicated history of their relationship is revealed.Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise. Young and newly married, Milla carved her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. She earned the respect of the male farmers in her community and raised a son. But forty years later all she has left are memories and the proud, contrary Agaat. With punishing precision, yet infinite tenderness, Agaat performs her duties, balancing anger with loyalty. As Milla’s white world and its certainties recede and Agaat faces the prospect of freedom, the shift of power between them mirrors the historic changes happening around them. Marlene van Niekerk’s epic masterpiece portrays how two women—and, perhaps, a nation—can forge a path toward understanding and reconciliation.

Rainey Royal


Dylan Landis - 2014
    Henry Prize (for "Trust," a section of this novel) weaves a powerful story of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality.Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal lives with her father, a jazz musician with a cultish personality, in a once-elegant, now-decaying brownstone. Her mother has abandoned the family, and Rainey fends off advances from her father’s best friend while trying desperately to nurture her own creative drives and build a substitute family. She’s a rebel, even a criminal, but she’s also deeply vulnerable, fighting to figure out how to put back in place the boundaries her life has knocked down, and more than that, struggling to learn how to be an artist and a person in a broken world.Rainey Royal is told in 14 narratives of scarred and aching beauty that build into a fiercely powerful novel: the harrowing and ultimately affirming story of a young artist.

The Story of an African Farm


Olive Schreiner - 1883
    The first of the great South African novels chronicles the adventures of three childhood friends who defy societal repression. The novel's unorthodox views on religion and marriage aroused widespread controversy upon its 1883 publication, and the work retains in power more than a century later. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

Looking for a Rain God and Other Short Stories from Africa


Ian Gordon - 1995
    

True Believers


Joseph O'Connor - 1991
    Here are sad-hearted priests, old friends, young lovers, rockers and rebels, husbands and runaway wives, punks and poets. They all are clinging desperately to some kind of faith in a mutable and dangerous world.

Pretending the Bed is a Raft


Nanci Kincaid - 1997
    Watching the mysterious transformation of your mother as she dolls herself up for a night on the town--with a man other than your father. Watching your best friend fall for the bad boy in town. Wondering if the man at work you're secretly in love with means something by the hand he lets linger on your arm. Kissing a man named Gable on a moonlit night when you've just found out you have only a few months left to live.With an irresistible narrative voice that captures both the humor and heartbreak of love, Nanci Kincaid paints a portrait of women's lifelong courtship with men that will make you laugh and cry in recognition.

London - Cape Town - Joburg


Zukiswa Wanner - 2014
    . . London was good. Is good. I love London. But . . .” 1994 The world is about to change. The first truly democratic election in South Africa’s history is about to unite Nelson Mandela’s rainbow nation at the ballot box. And, across the world, those in exile, those who could not return home, those who would not return home, wait. Watch and wait . . . London Martin O’Malley isn’t one of those watching and waiting. He is too busy trying to figure out if Germaine Spencer really is the girl for him and why his best friend is intent on ruining every relationship he gets involved in. And then . . . And then Germaine is pregnant and suddenly the world really has changed for Martin O’Malley. South Africa A land of opportunity. A place where a young black man with an MSc from the London School of Economics could have it all, would have it all. But what does Martin O’Malley, London born and bred with an Irish surname, really know about his mother’s country? His motherland. A land he has never seen.

Love, Lost


Lori L. Otto - 2011
    In an effort to redeem himself, he attempts to rekindle the flame that had been ignited between them. Just as the two share a moment that leaves them both breathless, Emi's reality catches up to her.Love, Lost was awarded Honorable Mention in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category in the 78th Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition. It is a reworked chapter from a novel in the Emi Lost & Found series. This story is included in The Complete Emi Lost & Found Series.

Anticopernicus


Adam Roberts - 2011
    4-chapters in total; only available for e-purchase.First contact: despite our cosmic littleness, the aliens have come to visit. But they have parked their interstellar craft on the outskirts of the solar system, and despite friendly interaction (their English if fluent and idiomatic) they will come no closer. So an Earth ship, the "Leibniz", crewed by the best and the brightest, begins the slow haul towards the Oort cloud, in the hopes that meeting these alien creatures will answer the most profound questions humanity can ask. “Anticopernicus” is not their story, though. It is the story of Ange Mlinko, an ordinary individual working the Earth-Mars trade routes, largely uninterested in the arrival of alien intelligences. And because the focus is on her, it remains to be seen whether this short novel can answer the following questions: why have the aliens come? Why won't they come any closer than the furthest edges of the solar system? What does this have to do with the nature of the mysterious ‘dark energy’ pervading the cosmos? What about the celebrated Fermi Paradox? And most pressingly: could Copernicus have been wrong all along?

Africa39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara


Ellah Wakatama AllfreyShafinaaz Hassim - 2014
    This makes it a special year for the Port Harcourt Book Festival, which will be in its seventh year, and bigger than ever. They are joining forces with the internationally renowned Hay Festival, which will bring to Port Harcourt its 39 Project-a competition to identify the thirty-nine most promising young talents under the age of forty in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. It follows the success of Bogotá 39 in 2007 and Beirut 39 in 2010. Both recognized a number of authors who now have international profiles: in Bogotá, Adriana Lisboa, Alejandro Zambra, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Daniel Alarcón, and Junot Díaz; in Beirut, Randa Jarrar, Joumana Haddad, Abdellah Taia, Samar Yazbek, and Faiza Guene. In Nigeria this year, the esteemed judges include leading-edge publisher Margaret Busby; novelist and playwright Elechi Amadi,writer and scholar Osonye Tess Onwueme, and Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina.For the second time, Bloomsbury is honored to be a part of the festivities, publishing worldwide Africa39-a collection of brand new work from these talented thirty-nine.With an introduction by Wole Soyinka, Africa39 is a must-read for anyone curious about Africa today and Africa tomorrow, as envisioned through the eyes of its brightest literary stars.

The Reactive


Masande Ntshanga - 2014
    With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government's fatal policies on HIV & AIDS."—Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers"Woozy, touching... a novel that delivers an unexpected love letter to Cape Town, painting it as a place of frustrated glory. The Reactive often teems with a beauty that seems to carry on in front of its glue-huffing wasters despite themselves."—Marian Ryan, Slate"With The Reactive, [Ntshanga] has created an immersive and powerful portrait of drug use, community, and health issues by exploring what it was like to be young, black, South African, and HIV positive in the early aughts."—VICE"[The Reactive] is an affecting, slow-burning novel that gives a fantastic sense of a particular place and time, and of the haunted inner life of its protagonist."—Tobias Carroll, Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)"This novel about an HIV+ man who mourns the death of his brother in Cape Town is shaping up to be one of the best debuts of 2016."—Flavorwire"Sharp and affecting... [Ntshanga] directs the story with an amazing precision of language that few writers can achieve in a lifetime of work. With a style all his own, Ntshanga animates despair and agitation in a collage of moments, memories and landscapes that speak volumes of a exigent moment in South African history."—Alibi"Gritty and revealing, Ntshanga's debut novel offers a brazen portrait of present-day South Africa. This is an eye-opening, ambitious novel."—Publishers Weekly"Ntshanga offers a devastating story yet tells it with noteworthy glow and flow that keeps pages turning until the glimmer-of-hope ending."—Library JournalFrom the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award comes the story of Lindanathi, a young HIV+ man grappling with the death of his brother, for which he feels unduly responsible. He and his friends—Cecelia and Ruan—work low-paying jobs and sell anti-retroviral drugs (during the period in South Africa before ARVs became broadly distributed). In between, they huff glue, drift through parties, and traverse the streets of Cape Town where they observe the grave material disparities of their country.A mysterious masked man appears seeking to buy their surplus of ARVs, an offer that would present the friends with the opportunity to escape their environs, while at the same time forcing Lindanathi to confront his path, and finally, his past.With brilliant, shimmering prose, Ntshanga has delivered a redemptive, ambitious, and unforgettable first novel.Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013, and a finalist for the Caine Prize in 2015. He was born in East London in 1986 and graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award, an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship and a Bundanon Trust Award. His work has appeared in The White Review, Chimurenga, VICE and n + 1. He has also written for Rolling Stone magazine.

I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter


David Chariandy - 2018
    A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.

Cold Stone Jug


Herman Charles Bosman - 1949
    Its rise to classic status has been unstoppable, and it is now widely considered the founding text of all South African prison writings. As readable as ever, it is now hailed as Bosman's masterpiece of irony as well, vivid and unforgettable.