The Madonna Of Excelsior

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374708231
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Madonna of Excelsior written by Zakes Mda and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new novel by a towering presence in contemporary South African literature In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa's white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal -and of a country in which apartheid concealed interracial liaisons of every kind. Niki, the fallen madonna, transgresses boundaries for the sake of love; her choices have repercussions in the lives of her black son and mixed-race daughter, who come of age in post-apartheid South Africa, where freedom prompts them to reexamine their country's troubled history at first hand. By turns earthy, witty, and tragic, The Madonna of Excelsior is a brilliant depiction of life in South Africa and of the dramatic changes between the 1970s and the present.

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374708215
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Heart of Redness written by Zakes Mda and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374708193
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Whale Caller written by Zakes Mda and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A voice for which one should feel not only affection but admiration." --The New York Times The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda's fifth novel, is his most enchanting and accessible book yet-a romantic comedy of sorts in which the changing face of post-apartheid South Africa is revealed through prodigious, lyrical storytelling. As the novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus, on the country's west coast, is overrun with whale watchers-foreign tourists wearing floral shirts and toting expensive binoculars, determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the Whale Caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he calls Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the Whale Caller frets like a jealous lover-oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him. After much ado-which Mda relates with great relish-the two misfits fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their on-again, off-again relationship suggests something of the fitful nature of change in post-apartheid South Africa, where just living from one day to the next can be challenge enough. Mda has spoken of the end of apartheid as a lifting of the South African novelist's burden to write on political subjects. With The Whale Caller, he has written a tender, charming novel-the work of a virtuoso among international writers.

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780312423254
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book She Plays with the Darkness written by Zakes Mda and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a mountain village in Lesotho, the beautiful Dikosha lives for, setting herself apart from her fellow villagers. Her brother, Radisene, struggles amid political upheaval to find a life for himself. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging.

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 142993364X
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cion written by Zakes Mda and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-08-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Picador Paperback Original The hero of Zakes Mda's beloved Ways of Dying, Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of the runaway slaves who were their ancestors. Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man's sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio. Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother's quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki's, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad.

Author : Zoë Wicomb
Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1620976110
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Still Life written by Zoë Wicomb and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020 A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing. Wicomb's majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the "Father of South African Poetry." In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son. At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf's Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle's life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.

Author : Zakes Mda
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429949937
Total Pages : 690 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sometimes There Is a Void written by Zakes Mda and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's remarkable life story of growing up in South Africa, Lesotho, and America, told with style and gusto. Zakes Mda is the most acclaimed South African writer of the independence era. His novels tell stories that venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a people's struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells the story of a life that intersects with the political life of his country but that at its heart is the classic adventure story of an artist, lover, father, teacher, and bon vivant. Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and grew up in Soweto's ambitious educated black class. At age fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a "founding spirit" of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but it was just another chapter in Mda's coming-of-age. He served as an altar boy (and was preyed on by priests), flirted with shebeen girls, feared the racist Boers, read comic books alongside the literature of the PAC, fell for the music of Dvorák and Coltrane, wrote his first stories—and felt the void at the heart of things that makes him an outsider wherever he goes. The Soweto uprisings called him to politics; playwriting brought him back to South Africa, where he became writer in residence at the famed Market Theatre; three marriages led him hither and yon; acclaim brought him to America, where he began writing the novels that are so thick with the life of his country. In all this, Mda struggled to remain his own man, and with Sometimes There Is a Void he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.

Author : Achmat Dangor
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 0802199712
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bitter Fruit written by Achmat Dangor and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Man Booker Prize finalist. “[A] deeply unsettling novel about the new South Africa . . . The people and their stories are unforgettable” (Booklist, starred review). With the publication of Kafka’s Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa’s political history and its damaging legacy in the lives of those who live there. The last time Silas Ali encountered Lt. Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Silas’s wife, Lydia, in revenge for her husband’s participation in Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. When Silas sees Du Boise by chance twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Alis’ fragile peace. Meanwhile Silas and Lydia’s son, Mikey, a thoroughly contemporary young hip-hop lothario, contends in unforeseen ways with his parents’ pasts. “In the vein of J.M. Coetzee’s novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans,” Bitter Fruit is a harrowing story of a brittle family on the crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of the pieties of revolutionary movements (Publishers Weekly). “A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic . . . its progress like slow dancing.” —The Independent “Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.” —The Guardian

Author : Gail Fincham
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 082144414X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Dance of Life written by Gail Fincham and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007). Dance of Life explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda’s strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.

Author : Ghalib Lakhnavi
Publisher : Modern Library
ISBN 13 : 0812977440
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Adventures of Amir Hamza written by Ghalib Lakhnavi and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a special abridged English translation of a major Indo-Persian epic: a panoramic tale of magic and passion, a classic hero’s odyssey that has captivated much of the world. It is the spellbinding story of Amir Hamza, the adventurer who in the service of the Persian emperor defeats many enemies, loves many women, and converts hundreds of infidels to the True Faith before finding his way back to his first love. In Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s remarkable abridged rendition, this masterwork is captured with all its colorful action and fantastic elements intact. Appreciated as the seminal Islamic epic or enjoyed as a sweeping tale as rich and inventive as Homer’s epic sagas, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a true literary treasure.