To investigate the role of culture in the formation of a more radically democratic society, O'Brien brings together an unusual array of contemporary South African writing: cultural theory and debate, worker poetry, black and white feminist writing, Black Consciousness drama, the letters of exiled writers, and post-apartheid fiction and film. Paying subtle attention to well-known figures like Gordimer, Head, and Ndebele yet foregrounding less-studied writers like de Kok, Malange, Mapo-nya, and Marechera, O'Brien reveals in their work the construction of a political aesthetic more radically democratic than the current cultural normalization of nation-alism, ballot-box democracy, and liberal humanism. Notes, bib, index. xv, 333pp. USA . DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Best known as a novelist and political activist, Alex la Guma (1925-85) was also a journalist, comic strip artist, reviewer, sketcher, painter, short story writer and travel writer. Born in District Six, he was a founder member of the South African Coloured People's Organisation and a leading member of the Congress Alliance during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on a far wider range of his writing and artwork, some previously unpublished, this book combines biography with literary and political analyses to offer fresh insights into his major texts: A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord /(1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972) , A Soviet Journey (1975) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979). Index, bib, b/w illus, 258pp, UK. JAMES CURREY PUBLISHERS.

A major contribution to the study of South African literature, offering innovative readings of writers like Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, this study enhances our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control and of its imagined and actual transformation. Index, notes, 221pp, USA. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS USA.

Thorough and provocative analysis of South African children's literature during the decade around the release of Mandela. BNS, 160pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.

Self-contained essays that locate ethical and aesthetic challenges in the postcolonial era, both in South Africa and globally. What is Africa, what is the West? May the South and the North engage in new and challenging conversation? Teasing out the intricate value of literary culture in contemporary society, Chapman brings to this volume a new confidence and critical vocabu-lary that both energises older controversies and marks out fresh ground for debate. Index, 187pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

First broad-ranging reassessment of Nortje's life and poetic career. 163pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNISA PRESS.

Examines the works of Bessie Head and Alex La Guma, taking a comparative approach, critically analysing their fiction in the context of South African literature under apartheid. 152pp, NIGERIA. HEINEMANN EDUCATIONAL BOOKS NIGERIA.

When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to 'Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele', the idea of Mphahlele's death was remote and poetic. That death has now come and we mourn it. Manga-nyi's words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, 'the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time'. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele's rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and even some of his failures. 496pp, SOUTH AFRICA. WITWATERSRAND UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Survey of the writers fiction and context, written accessibly for those new to his work. All of the fiction is discussed, and the brooding presence of the political situation in South Africa, during the first part of his career, is given serious attention in a comprehensive account of the authors main influences. 130pp, UK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Although the new South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages (some of them with highly developed literatures of their own), English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. Therefore this book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the post-apartheid present. It makes clear discriminations of value, guiding the reader to what the authors consider the most interesting and noteworthy writing from this period. An overview is followed by alphabetical entries providing accurate and objective information on genres and writers. It concludes with an appendix of authors published before 1945. 288pp, USA. COLUMBIA U P.

An account of the gruelling, often dangerous, encounter with apartheid society by film director Lionel Rogosin while making his acclaimed film, shot in the late fifties in and around Johannesburg, particularly in Sophiatown. Rogosin's intention was to make a film that would 'give a voice' to the oppressed and, with considerable input from the legendary trio of Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane, writers associated with the pioneering magazine, Drum, he produced a unique and award winning piece of cinematographic history. Peter Davis, a filmmaker friend, has edited Rogosin's diaries into a fascinating portrait of life under apartheid, and of the efforts of activists and artists to change that system. Black and white photographs and film stills throughout. Includes tributes from friends Robert Downey Snr. and Milek Knebel. 149pp, SOUTH AFRICA. STE PUBLISHERS.

South African film culture, like so much of its public life, has undergone a tremendous transfor-mation during its first decade of democracy. Filmmakers, once in exile, banned, or severely restricted, have returned home; subjects once outlawed are now fair game; and a new crop of insurgent filmmakers are coming to the fore. This volume presents twenty-five in-depth interviews with established and emerging South African filmmakers such as Zola Maseko, Teboho Mahlatsi, Ntshaveni wa Luruli, and many more. The interviews capture the filmmakers' spirit, energy, and ambition as they attempt to give birth to a new filmic culture. 236pp, USA. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.

A compilation of work on D. H. Lawrence by past and present South African scholars in the country and abroad. Part One, 'Retrospect', which carries accounts of studying and teaching Lawrence in South Africa, is an important record of an aspect of English studies in that country as it developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Part Two includes reprints of nine of the best articles available on Lawrence from South African scholars, including Mark Kinkead-Weekes, H. M. Daleski and Christopher Heywood. Part Three has five new essays, including, for example, 'Judgement and Maturity in Sons and Lovers and The Fox', by Francois Hugo, and 'Conflicting Visions of the Primitive in D. H. Lawrence', by Jim Phelps. Part Four comprises two long poems inspired by Lawrence, and Part Five lists the articles, letters and reviews on Lawrence published in South African journals, and the theses and dissertations on Lawrencean subjects held at South African universities. Index, 335pp, SOUTH AFRICA. ECHOING GREEN PRESS.

A collection of the most significant works of one of South Africa's foremost thinkers and writers, on themes of Education, African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness and Literary Appreciation. Well known as a literary critic and fiction writer his novel Down Second Avenue was recently selected as one of Africa's 100 best books. 485pp, SOUTH AFRICA. KWELA BOOKS.

Critical study of its subject, from colonial and pre-colonial times to the present. Discusses selected poems, plays and prose works in five literary traditions: Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Afrikaans, English, and Indian. The discussion includes over 100 authors and selected works, including poets from Mqhayi, Marais and Campbell to Butler, Serote and Krog, theatre writers from Boniface and Black to Fugard and Mda, and fiction writers from Schreiner and Plaatje to Bessie Head and the Nobel prizewinner’s Gordimer and Coetzee. 310pp, UK. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Serote looks at the concept of the African intellectual and the emergence of a South African national identity in the midst of the struggle for survival. 211pp, SOUTH AFRICA. VIVLIA PUBLISHERS.

Investigates the ways in which identity is constituted in text and image in Breytenbach's works. Also points to ways in which these case-studies relate to other con-temporary identity formations in South Africa. Col & b/w ill, notes, refs, 127pp, SOUTH AFRICA. KWELA BOOKS.

Examines film-makers' stereotype of imperialist South Africa, with whites in centre frame and Africans depicted as faithful servants or savage enemies. Based on interviews with directors, scriptwriters, actors and historians, relating film-making to broader changes in South African society and elsewhere. B/w illus, filmography, refs, index, 205pp, SOUTH AFRICA. RAVAN PRESS.

Explores the concept of entanglement in relation to readings of literature, new media forms and painting. In the process, it moves away from a persistent apartheid optic, drawing on ideas of sameness and difference, and their limits, in order to elicit ways of living and imagining that are just starting to take shape and for which we might not yet have a name. Attempts to capture the contradictory mixture of innovation and inertia, of loss, violence and xenophobia as well as experimentation and desegregation, which characterises the South African cultural present. Index, bib, notes, 198pp, SOUTH AFRICA. WITWATERSRAND UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Includes essays on this seminal figure in the South African literary tradition by Cherry Clayton, Anthony Voss and Lauretta Ngcobo. Bib, b/w photos, 246pp, AUSTRALIA. DANGAROO PRESS.

New in paperback. Following on from Stranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several (Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai) lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siecle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature's greatest writers, Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his 'wrestlings with the German language'. There is an essay on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul. 256pp, UK. VINTAGE.

Pays sustained attention to the dynamic interaction between Coetzee's fiction and his critical writing, exploring the Nobel prize-winner's participation in, and contribution to, contemporary literary-philosophical debates. Index, bib, 224pp, UK. PALGRAVE.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee is one of the most widely taught contemporary writers, but also one of the most elusive. Many critics who have addressed his work have devoted themselves to rendering it more accessible and acceptable, often playing down the features that discomfort and perplex his readers. Yet it is just these features, Derek Attridge argues in eight essays covering 11 of Coetzee's novels and memoirs, that give Coetzee's work its haunting power and offer its greatest rewards. Index, bib, xiii, 225pp, USA. CHICAGO U P.

Taking the author's ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to under-standing Coetzee's fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee's singular, modernist response to the apartheid and post-apartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. 264pp, USA. OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS.

A guide to the literary past and present of the Eastern Cape. Organised regionally, the visitor can explore the cities, towns, coasts and countryside discovering aspects of places through writers' eyes. Illustrated with poems, prose extracts, and photographs and drawings by Basil Mills. Index, bib, notes, map, xi, 402pp, SOUTH AFRICA. DOUBLE STOREY BOOKS.

It's a cliché to describe South Africa as a land of infinite landscapes and dramatic contrasts. It's even harder to capture those landscapes in words. This book showcases scenes of the beloved country as described by the country's most celebrated writers. Ranging right through history, from the firelight tales of the first storytellers to modern voices on the web, this book encom-passes the brilliant kaleidoscope of our local scribes - from drama to poetry, from revered names to controversial voices, from hard-hitting journalism to lyrical meditations. 288pp, SOUTH AFRICA. DOUBLE STOREY BOOKS.

Looking at Mongane Serote's Gods in Our Time, Mike Nichol's The Ibis Tapestry and Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying, the author shows how literary engagement with the past seeks to rupture the continuity of a strongly dichotomised society and show new ways of constructing the past. Bib, notes, 135pp, DENMARK. MUSEUM TUSCULANUM PRESS.

Apart from the book's value as a documentation of an important period in South African film history it contains information about the industry and its products, the experiences of apartheid, and a knowledge about how to analyse film from various perspectives. B/w illus, 386pp, SOUTH AFRICA. GENUGTIGS.

Uses a broad range of literature to examine the political culture of white South Africa, ranging from propoganda through bestsellers by Wilbur Smith and James McClure to literary works by Alan Paton, Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer. BNS, 216pp, UK. GREENWOOD PUBLISHING GROUP.

Follows the development of Gordimer's writing in the context of the historical changes in South Africa. Index, 276pp, bib, SOUTH AFRICA. RAVAN PRESS.

The first volume of South African author's correspondence collects 550 letters concerning the young Schreiner's work as a governess, the years she spent abroad, the publication of The Story of an African Farm, her relationships with Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, Edward Carpenter and W.T.Stead, and her involvement in the political crisis that culminated in the Anglo-Boer War. 409pp, UK. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Dennis Brutus, imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela is known worldwide for his unparalleled eloquence as an opponent of the apartheid South African regime. Since its fall, he has been a voice for global justice and humanity, speaking and writing extensively on issues of debt, poverty, war, racism and neoliberalism. This vital original collection of interviews, poetry and essays is the first book of its kind to bring together the full, forceful range of his work. 414pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

New edition of Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture appeared initially in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change, the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society. 184pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Connects the black literary canon in South Africa, from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century, to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history, literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation, that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments, and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity. Index, bib, notes, 236pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Considers the various ways in which auto/biographical accounts situate and question the self in contemporary southern Africa. Selected contents: I Speak Their Wordless Woe, Dennis Brutus interviewed by Simon Lewis; All Autobiography is 'Autre'-biography, J.M.Coetzee interviewed by David Atwell; We Would Write Very Dull Books If We Just Wrote about Ourselves, Sindiwe Magona interviewed by Stephan Meyer; Metaphors of Self, Es'kia Mphahlele interviewed by N.Chabani Manganyi; Writing Autobiography and Writing Fiction, Doris Lessing interviewed by M.J.Daymond; Reflections in Identity, Breyten Breytenbach interviewed by Marilet Sienaert; 'Every Secret Thing' as Family Memoir, Gillian Slovo interviewed by Margaretta Jolly; Reflec-tions in a Cracked Mirror' Pieter-Dirk Uys interviewed by Mervyn McMurty; Philosophical Reflections on Chronicles of Conversion, Wilhelm Verwoerd interviewed by Stephan Meyer; Group Portrait: self, family and nation on exhibit, Paul Faber, Rayda Jacobs and David Goldblatt interviewed by Stephan Meyer. 487pp, USA. UNIVERSITY PRESS OF HAWAII.

A collection of seven essays on the life and work of Sindiwe Magona, celebrating her retirement from the UN and her return to South Africa. Also includes several interviews with Magona. Bib, notes, 207pp, SOUTH AFRICA. University of Kwazulu Natal Press.

What is the role of literature in contexts of severe political oppression and resistance? This study traces the responses to this question provided by the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. Embedded in the influential critical texts of the field, it claims, are hidden narratives of land, race, gender, desire and embodiment. The volume explores these submerged dimensions of South African literary history and the influence they continue to exert well into the post-apartheid era. It suggests that significant continuities exist between late-apartheid and post-apartheid literary culture, and positions these against the interpretive horizon of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Index, 145pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNISA PRESS.

Study of a broad and ambitious selection of contemporary South African literature, fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir to make sense of the ways in which these works 'remap' the intersections of memory, space/place, and the body, as they explore the legacy of apartheid. 248pp, UK. PALGRAVE.

Examines how cinema in South Africa represents national identities, particularly with regard to race. This significant and unique contribution establishes interrelationships between South African cinema and key points in South Africa’s history, showing how cinema figures in the making, entrenching and undoing of apartheid. This study spans the twentieth century and beyond through detailed analyses of selected films, beginning with De Voortrekkers (1916) through to Mapantsula (1988) and films produced post apartheid, including Drum (2004), Tsotsi (2005) and Zulu Love Letter (2004). Index, folmography, bib, notes, b/w illus, 220pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.

The depth and variety of South African poetry comes alive in these interviews, first published in the poetry journal New Coin. Twenty poets of the 1980s and 1990s talk about their aesthetics, politics, and the impulses that drive their writing. 182pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Argues that 'nation' and 'literature' are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005, asking: who published what, where, why, and how; how and why work was construed as 'South African', what this meant, and how it affected reading. Exploring new approaches to studying colonial and postcolonial print cultures, it seeks to redress inadequately historicised or transnationally situated studies of South African writing in English. 256pp, UK. MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Works within the frameworks of post-colonial studies and cultural studies in order to theorise, and then to illustrate, the possibilities for cultural creation in the context of oppression. It re-works the concept of hybridity, and the philosophies of liberalism and humanism, in order to suggest that these important and much-contested terrains within critical theory have specific potential in a South African context. This book applies these theoretical points to a specific trajectory of writing in English in the region, which it finds embodied in the writing of Solomon Plaatje, Peter Abrahams, Eskia Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane and Can Themba. By seeking to unlock the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which Shakespeare is useful to these writers, the book addresses the traditional imbalance of knowledges in Shakespeare Studies by conceptualizing the presence of Shakespeare in these texts as indicative of an act of cultural appropriation and political resistance. BNS, 316pp, USA. EDWIN MELLEN PRESS.

Twenty-nine essays, mostly literary, on, among others, Defoe, Nooteboom, Kafka, Musil, Dostoevsky, Borges, Rushdie, Mahfouz, Mazrui, Doris Lessing. 374pp. UK. VINTAGE.

A look at the South African film industry in transition from film making by the white minority to a national cinema. Index, refs, xii, 272pp, USA. WAYNE STATE U P.

Institute francais d'Afrique du Sud (IFAS) Working Papers Series number 6, August 2005. Essays on ten years of literary exchanges between France and South Africa. TEXT IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH. 89pp, SOUTH AFRICA. IFAS.

A consideration a specific instances of confessional practice and discourse in the works of ten prominent South African writers. The author takes issue with Michel Foucault, who argued that confession is only another form of oppressive discourse. 232pp, USA. HEINEMANN INC

A study tracing the development of literature in South Africa under apartheid and seeks to identify the ways in which writers and theatre practitioners are now facing the challenge of a new social order. The main focus is on the work of black writers, prime among them Matsemela Manaka, Mtutuzeli Matshoba and Richard Rive. Bib, 376pp, THE NETHERLANDS. RODOPI.

First volume of essays devoted to a critical appraisal of Zakes Mda, the award-winning South African novelist and playwright. In his plays and novels, which draw on both Western and indigenous performance traditions, Mda engages with the history of Southern Africa during and after apartheid. Writing from a position of exile, as well as from within his native country, he examines the lives of ordinary people and the ways in which they come to terms with the effects of apartheid. 450pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UNIVERSITY OF KWAZULU-NATAL PRESS.

Analysis of the works of selected South African women writers, examining the ways in which each deals with concepts of white identity. Drawing on a range of source materials, from popular novels (Pamela Jooste and Susan Mann) and magazine columns (Marianne Thamm) to major works such as 'A Change of Tongue' (Antjie Krog) and short stories by Nadine Gordimer and Marlene van Niekerk, this book seeks to tease out the hidden meanings and assumptions in the ways these writers have portrayed the white South African experience. 240pp, SOUTH AFRICA. DAVID PHILIP.

Tributes, critical essays, extracts from their novels, interviews and photographs commemorating the lives of two promising young South African writers who died within five weeks of one another. Index, 264pp, SOUTH AFRICA. UMGANGATHO MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS.

A study of Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele discussing how each author forms a response to the upheavals of late apartheid. Index, bib, notes, xii, 274pp, SOUTH AFRICA. University of Kwazulu Natal Press.

Contemporary women writers in South Africa and Australia are still writing about similar issues as did earlier generations of women, such as exclusions from discourses of nation, the problematic relationship to place and belonging, relations with indigenous people and the way in which women's subjectivity has been constructed through national stereotypes and representations. This book describes and analyses some contemporary responses to these issues through close readings of particular texts including Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup and Eva Sallis's The City of Sealions. BNS, 240pp, UK. ROUTLEDGE.

Set against the backdrop of the success of the first democratic elections and the launch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, this is a story of two mothers in search of their daughters. Thandeka Khumalo is challenged with mending her estranged relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Simangaliso, who grew up with her grandparents because of Thandeka's career and political commitments. Tormented by a sense of guilt and grief that refuses to wane, Thandeka is battling to adjust to the changes around her. Her melancholy soul is compelled to confront her experiences of detention and torture when ghosts from the past reappear. Me'Tau, the mother of a young activist whose assassination Thandeka witnessed and reported, wants Thandeka to help in finding the body of Dineo so that she can be given a fitting burial. For mourning to end and for healing to take place, the psychic demons that haunt the present must be recognized and exorcised. Marking the ebb-and-flow of the adults' attempts to deal with the historical inheritances of apartheid, is the 'Love Letter' that Simangaliso is weaving as a gift to her mother. A colorful tapestry of beads, trinkets and buttons, the 'Love Letter' encapsulates the power of the arts in fostering memory-work, healing and love. 128pp, SOUTH AFRICA. WITWATERSRAND UNIVERSITY PRESS.