Holding power to account
It is a rare feat, to successfully write a Gothic novel that is comic and tragic, along with the element of horror that is bound within the genre. That is, if you want to assign a genre to Sven Axelrad’s debut novel, Buried Treasure.… Read more
By Rod Amner
“When we allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defences and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party.… Read more
Not thinking about death – our own and that of the people we love – is probably a mechanism of the mind that prevents us from being paralysed by its inevitability. Although, paradoxically, death can provide the impetus to enjoy life while we have it, and to find the kind of perspective that allows us to gracefully deal with the daily frustrations and irritations that accompany a beating heart.… Read more
It is a mighty tome from the great Nigerian writer. Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth is a mire of poetic prose. It is possible to sink in it. Flail about and enjoy the view. Tense doesn’t always seem to make sense, but not often enough to do away with it altogether.… Read more
Never travel without a book. Fair enough. So it was forgetting to pack a novel that led me to buying Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at the airport bookshop before boarding a flight upcountry.
With his love of hunting, game fishing, bull fighting, being wounded in World War I and on the front lines of both the Spanish civil war and World War II as a journalist, as well as having four wives, Hemingway has become synonymous with masculinity, often deemed to be toxic, to the point of being a parody.… Read more
Given the prevalence of social media, this obsession with propagating a curated image of oneself appears to have seeped into other aspects of our lives, and our creative endeavours.
In literature the memoir, once the preserve of writers or individuals of considerable achievement, and usually only published toward the end of one’s life, have become more prevalent.… Read more
Opinions on billionaires – their very existence, that is – tend to be polarised. People either worship them or despise them.
Those who worship them, read their books (ghost written, of course) on how to be successful, follow their tweets and write Facebook fawning over how prophetic their favourite billionaire is, tend to be the same people who think capitalism, especially unfettered capitalism, is a good thing.… Read more
England abolished slavery in 1833. It took the United States of America another 32 years, and a civil war leaving more than 750,000 bodies in its wake.
John Wilkes Booth was 26 when he shot and fatally wounded Abraham Lincoln in a the theatre, just five days after Confederate General Robert E.… Read more
Horror is a strange genre, to me at least. I cannot fathom what is enjoyable about making oneself feel scared.
A female friend has posited that women enjoy horror because it’s not as real to them; in a patriarchal society, they’re not the ones expected to go out into the dark and find out what’s making that scratching sound on the roof.… Read more
If you play a word association game with a South African, you can put good money down that four times out of five, the response to ‘Nigerian’ will be either ‘drug dealer’, ‘makwerekwere’, ‘criminal’, or some version of the above. Essentially, negative.… Read more