New Release Books by Olivier Moreillon

This volume contains interviews with fourteen contemporary South African authors: Mariam Akabor, Sifiso Mzobe, Fred Khumalo, Futhi Ntshingila, Niq Mhlongo, Zukiswa Wanner, Nthikeng Mohlele, Mohale Mashigo, Lauren Beukes, Charlie Human, Yewande Omotoso, Andrew Salomon, Imraan Coovadia and Fred Strydom. The conversations with the writers are accompanied by vignettes of the authors'' lives and summaries of their works. In curating this book, Danyela Dimakatso Demir and Olivier Moreillon step beyond pure literary theory and analysis by allowing the authors to speak to and assess the literary landscape, of which they form a part and which they co-create. However, Demir and Moreillon also trace concepts and terms that describe the current moment of South African literature, such as post-transitional literature and literature beyond 2000. By adopting a world-literary approach to (post)apartheid literature, this book makes an important contribution to debates on contemporary South African writing that seeks to raise awareness of the imbalance in both critical and public attention between literary ''big names'', and the newer generation of South African writers, who go largely unnoticed.

This study analyses the representation of Durbanite and Capetonian urban spaces in the following selection of post-apartheid works: Mariam Akabor''s "Flat 9", Rozena Maart''s "Rosa''s District Six", Johan van Wyk''s "Man Bitch", K. Sello Duiker''s "Thirteen Cents", Bridget McNulty''s "Strange Nervous Laughter", and Lauren Beukes'' "Moxyland". The focus lies on the interrelatedness of shifting post-apartheid subjectivities and urban space (and place) in these literary works. The analysis not only grants access to different ''new voices` of post-apartheid literature, it also sheds light on the perception of South African history, urban geography, and cultural topography - essentially, on real as well as imagined South African urban spaces - as the literary representations of city-spaces become archives of cultural transformation processes; a gateway to the understanding of the developments and changes of, and within, the two cities in question.