Holding power to account
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
This tale of doom and resilience by Alistair MacKay follows three queer friends who must navigate climate collapse as their world unravels. Cape Town’s elite has fled to The Citadel, a temperature-controlled dome on Signal Hill where the citizens live in virtual reality, blind to what’s around them.… Read more
Intimate, is one way to describe Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.
There are only four characters: close friends Alice and Eileen, and the men with whom they are each intertwined, being Felix and Simon respectively.
Alice is a wildly successful young novelist – much like Rooney herself – and has returned to Ireland after a nervous breakdown in New York, what with the demands of book signings and talks and the social circuit expectations success brings.… Read more
This may be the central question of Colson Whitehead’s tenth novel, Harlem Shuffle. The world is Harlem, the person is Raymond Carney, who, as Whitehead dryly describes him, “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”.… Read more
Thousands of police-issue guns – the made-in-South-Africa 9mm Z88 – have been sold to Cape Town gangs since the mid-2000s to early 2015. The flood of guns to gangs saw the murder rate in the city climb from a low of about 41 per 100,000 people in 2009, to about 63 per 100,000 by 2015.… Read more
The authors are both millionaires thanks to their successful digital entrepreneurship. Ali created the startup Just Eat, which was an early version of Uber Eats. Kubba made his fortune through Search Engine Optimisation, ending up earning himself passive income and travelling the world.… Read more