Umuzi

‘Vladislavić is a rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it.’ – Sunday Times

Flashback Hotel combines two critically acclaimed collections of Vladislavić’s short stories, Missing Persons (1990) – for which he received the Olive Schreiner Prize – and Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996).

About the author

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria. He moved to Johannesburg in the seventies to study at Wits and has lived in the city ever since. One of South Africa’s foremost contemporary authors, his work include The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys (2006). As an editor, Vladislavić has worked with many of South Africa’s major writers. He co-edited blank_Architecture, apartheid and after (1998) with Hilton Judin and edited T’kama-Adamastor (2000), a book of essays on the painting by Cyril Coetzee. In 2004 he coordinated the Johannesburg exhibition of Second Aid and researched and wrote Willem Boshoff, a monograph on the South African conceptual artist, published in 2005.

Missing Persons (1990), his first volume of short stories, won the 1991 Olive Schreiner Prize. The Folly (1993) won the CNA Prize. Two stories in Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996) won the English Academy’s Thomas Pringle Award for short fiction. The Restless Supermarket (2001) won the 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Award. Portrait with Keys won the 2007 Alan Paton Award and the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize for best creative work in English.

Book details

• Flashback Hotel: Early Stories by Ivan Vladislavić
  EAN: 9781415201077
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The increasingly celebrated SA crime author Jassy Mackenzie has a treat for you: she’s posted two short stories to her website, which are guaranteed to give you thrills and chills. Here are tasters of “Tough Love” and “On The Run” – we recommend that you click through!

from “Tough Love”:

Timothy Littlewood lowered himself down onto the wedge of cardboard. Worn and brittle from months of use, it offered his knees no protection from the rough surface beneath.

He dunked the brush into the metal bucket, shivering as his hands plunged into the icy water. He lifted it out, slippery with soap, and bent to scrub the floor.

A whistling sound warned him, and he cringed as the whip lashed across his shoulders. He knew better than to cry out, but his breath escaped him in a silent, shuddering sigh.

“Go faster, you slacker. Think you’ve got all day down here?” Her voice was harsh, with a strong South African accent.

• Read the complete short story

from “On the Run”:

She couldn’t believe they had caught up with her. Here, in this dusty little town in the middle of nowhere, with veld and farmland stretching to the horizon in every direction, thousands of miles away from where it all began.

Still, she had worried. With the Internet and satellite TV, news travelled as fast around the world as gossip through a village. She was sure that there was a computer or a satellite dish in some of the cottages on what was optimistically called Main Street – the only tarred road in town. All it would take was a few inquisitive taps on a keyboard, or the wrong choice of channel at the wrong time, and they would know. She had hoped that nobody would be curious enough to make the effort. She had hoped that in this remote part of South Africa, people perceived the UK as boring and far away, much too English to worry about.

• Read the complete short story

Book details

• My Brother’s Keeper by Jassy Mackenzie
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415200780
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• Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781415200636
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