Bøker utgitt av Modjaji Books

A Bed on Bricks offers the gift of nine stories, each tracing complex psychological journeys and relationships threatened by incompatibilities of culture, age, gender, class, sexuality and race. Fumbling for one another across these divides, characters are as rich and diverse as the African landscapes they inhabit. This collection of stories explores difficult but profound truths about human nature and the intricacies of our interactions across the sub-Saharan region. In doing so, A Bed on Bricks rewards readers who enjoy tales that rupture cliches through original and challenging narratives.

The Girl Who Chased Otters is a sensitive tale of friendship, love and acceptance set in the southern suburbs of Cape Town.

The much-anticipated sequel to the turtle dove told me (Modjaji Books, 2013), which won a SALA Award in 2014, stem of the moon is the second volume in a trilogy that spans the years 1990 - 2010. In this collection, Sliepen paints impressions of a small town, Clarens in the Free State, as well as glimpses of life in the Netherlands and Bali. The reader shares the intimate experience of the birth of her first child and the poems take us on a profound journey through Namibia. Sliepen's latest collection is a love song to a child, a lover, a mother, and the quiet strength of the moon that connects us all.

The Summer We Didn't Die is Christine Coates' third poetry collection. It is an assured, tender collection that offers the reader a way to think about the mysteries at the heart of what it means to be human, in this place and time.

Skye is looking for normal. She grew up different and it rankles. Home isn't normal; her mom isn't normal. Her brother, beloved as he is, isn't quite normal, either. Her marriage was kind of normal (Cam is a wealthy, handsome man who's nice enough) and now it's a dumpster fire. And look at South Africa entirely NOT normal. She's got PTSD and she's in mourning. She doesn't know who she is or what she wants. She tries to anchor herself to tangible things: to her cooking, to her neighbour's children, to sex. But as she relives her past and tries to plan her future, she feels increasingly dislocated. Skye escapes when things get overwhelming, and realises almost too late that she's about to make everything worse.

The Only Magic We Know is a celebration of all the poets Modjaji has published. This anthology offers a taste of the range and diversity of the poems that have appeared in the individual poets' collections. The authors include:ingrid andersen • marike beyers • melissa butler • margaret clough • christine coates • colleen crawford cousins • phillippa yaa de villiers • isobel dixon • sarah frost • elisa galgut • dawn garisch • megan hall • kerry hammerton • khadija tracey heeger • colleen higgs • eliza kentridge • haidee kotze • sindiwe magona • michelle mcgrane • jenna mervis • joan metelerkamp • helen moffett • malika ndlovu • tariro ndoro • azila talit reisenberger • shirmoney rhode • beverly rycroft • arja salafranca • karin schimke • katleho kano shoro • thandi sliepen • annette snyckers • jeannie wallace mckeown • crystal warren • robin winckel-mellish • wendy woodward • makhosazana xaba • fiona zerbst

Fall Awake is a study in contrasts, exploring belonging and unbelonging; tracking the coming to terms with a fluid sexuality, and examining how relationships work or don't work. Jeannie McKeown also confronts head-on the terrifying life-changing experience that is motherhood. Sometimes irreverent, always heartfelt, the poems in this collection speak to a particular life, and to what it is to reach the middle of one, and still find yourself with new horizons and more to learn.

A man is travelling to Africa from Europe. And yet it is also about waiting - waiting for Africa.Volker, a German, leaves his home in Frankfurt for Windhoek. He leaves a lover, he is leaving for a long time, and he does not have a return ticket. He does not know anything about Africa, to him it is one country, not a continent, neither does he really know where he is going to; he just knows that he wants to leave Europe.Lufthansa, the airline that carries him stops at Charles de Gaulle airport and here he waits and waits and waits. And in the airport he observes and describes and thinks. The text is a stream of consciousness, Volker's thoughts. Interspersed with this are stories of people he encounters in the airport; a murderer, a terrorist, a person with dwarfism, a trans woman, a porn star, a terrorist, a child trafficker, a paedophile. All are connected, with each other, with Volker and with us, the readers.Adair's novel is innovative in form, self-conscious and self-critical; it challenges conventional Western assumptions that all good novels have a clear story line, a good plot and fully rounded characters.

A page turning, gender and genre-bending novel set on the Cape Flats in Capetown, South Africa; a story of people who live in a place of violence which involves drugs, corrupt clergy, queerness, friendships - and how these survive in a society that is dysfunctional due to historical social problems; very much a novel of now, the 21st century. A book that will change the literary landscape of South Africa.This work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences

This is Joan Metelerkamp's ninth book of poems. Her previous book, also published by Modjaji, Now the World Takes these Breaths (2014) was one of three on the short list for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many South African anthologies. As well as poems she has written reviews and essays about South African poetry, and read in most festivals in South Africa as well as in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Paris. She has been an associate of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, as a part-time teacher on the MA in creative writing at Rhodes University; before that, for five years, she edited New Coin poetry journal.

Her poems are as subtle and intimately telling as the differences between the three languages in which she writes and battles to live and dream. These verses touch and tug at one another like the Afrikaans of her childhood, the German of her husband and the South African English of her homeland. They agree to differ in all sorts of nuanced ways.

Carol Trehorne's only child, Max, is in ICU with severe burns. Max, a performance artist, has set himself alight. He recovers but it becomes clear that he is planning further performances that will put him at risk of serious injury or death. Carol, a single parent and a GP in a busy suburban practice, is worried that her son is not the genius his friends think he is, but might be on drugs or going psychotic. As she discusses her concerns with her son's psychiatrist, she wonders if her past behaviour, in particular her relationship with the adventurous and anti-social Jack, has influenced Max's determination to use his body as a site of violent art in the pursuit of revelation. Carol cannot accept that Max's self-harm will have any effect other than to add to the meaningless violence in the world. Accident raises questions about what kind of life is worth living and what death is worth dying. It explores the different responses artists and scientists can have to violence and self-destructive behaviour, and throws into sharp relief the difficulties parents face when their children me decisions that appear incomprehensible.

Greenwashing, corporate intransigence and bloody secrets. Maggie Cloete,s back. After working in Berlin and Joburg, she returns to present-day Pietermaritzburg as the day news editor for The Gazette. When a well-known environmentalist commits suicide, Maggie finds herself caught in the crossfire of conflicting interests. This escalates as loggers for Sentinel, a local paper company, unearth a gruesome find in the forest. As South Africa,s present confronts its past, Maggie faces the most bitter surprise of her life.

In this second collection Messages from the Bees Robin Winckel-Mellish shows the same qualities as A Lioness at my Heels, but this time runs deeper, darker and stronger. She delves not only into the riotous colours of southern Africa: birds, bees and caracals, but also climate change, while different kinds of love are pinpointed. Her poems of loss and grief are candid and even sensuous, showing the beauty of simplicity in bleakness. Both delicate and reflective these poems honour the wild while retaining a deeply-felt sense of connection with all that is relevant to our lives.

Christine Coates is a poet and writer from Cape Town who spends many hours walking on the mountain or besides the sea. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. She has an interest in life-writing or memoir, and the recovery of personal history through public and private imagery. She translated her great-grandfather's Boer War journals and presented them in parallel text as a handmade, leather-bound book. She has undertaken the 800km pilgrimage across Spain, on the Camino de Compostela. Her stories and poems have been published in various literary journals: New Contrast, New Coin, Deep Water Literary Journal, scrutiny2, and the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry Review. Her poems were selected for the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry anthologies 2011 - 2014.

In this, her third collection of poetry, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers invokes images of past and present with hypnotic clarity, summoning the heart and heat of memory - painful and happy alike - with the distinct musicality and visceral punch she is known for. Some poems invite contemplation. Question and provoke. Others are elegiac, moments for reverence in a rich, diverse collection that both spans decades and pauses to revel in the intensity and beauty of a single moment. In liquid form that incorporates prose and poetry, de Villiers fearlessly confronts and disrupts, dipping into a wellspring of images that are euphoric and horrifying. At once prophetic and playful, ice cream headache in my bone is an exploration and celebration of language, a definitive collection that yields and responds, burns and soothes, all the while, calling to a longing for truth, and a tongue not tempered by oppression or pain.

I offer you my perspectives, my many mothers' teachings. I present both hopelessness and moments that excite, the taxi mgosi that makes me write.Johannesburg performance-poet Katleho Kano Shoro puts her stage presence into print with this metapoetic debut collection that captures the cadences of her fearless voice, her unassuming sense of humour, and her enthusiasm for an Afrocentric literary culture. Katleho reflects on creativity, on the writing, reading and performance of poetry, exploring the language that structures it, the forces that inspire it and the transformation that follows our experience of it. From there her words wander through personal relationships and politics, articulating ideas about masculinity, sexuality, blackness, colonialism and our connections to those we love. Crafted with both the spoken and written word in mind, Serurubele invites you not only to read poetry but to voice it, to taste the language as it flows from your tongue, to feel its rhythms and to hear its rhyme. Katleho has performed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Grahamstown, Swaziland and London, and has been involved in myriad African literary initiatives. Recordings of her readings can be found online.

The title should have warned me. On reading the title poem, I realise any of the poems is a gateway into this passion with compassion, into a garden whose fragrances colour every sound lovers make when words have to cope. Make the lovers poets, see how each facet is etched, each jewel worked and polished. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. , Hugh Hodge