Modern South African Stories – Revised Selection edited by Stephan Gray is the new edition of the perennial seller.<br It now includes the best ten stories from the original edition and has been updated to include 17 entirely fresh stories by a wide range of new South African writers. Some of the stories have never been published before.

The original selection by the same editor was reprinted seven times by public demand. This selection of some of the finest work by South African writers, old and new, will continue to entertain and inspires lovers of the short story form. Authors whose stories appear in this book include Lionel Abrahams, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Pieter-Dirk Uys, Mongane Serote, Ahmed Essop and numerous other talented South African writers.

Stephen Gray was born in Cape Town in 1941. He is a well-known poet, now retired from academic life, and works in Johannesburg as a freelance journalist. Included in this anthology is one of his own stories, which first appeared in the Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.

his Omnibus of a Century of South African Short Stories makes available all the stories from three best-selling anthologies: A Century of South African Short Stories (1978); the revised edition (1993); and The New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). The ‘Century’ brand has endeared itself to a wide public that supported the original editions through ten reprints.

The chronological arrangement of the stories traces a rich inheritance. Beginning with San/Bushmen and African oral tales, first collected and translated in the mid-19th century, the selection concludes literally in the new 21st century, in a post-apartheid, globalising South Africa.

Acknowledged talents of the past like Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Herman Charles Bosman, C Louis Leipoldt and Alan Paton share the pages with writers of the present day: Nadine Gordimer, Es’kia Mphahlele, Hennie Aucamp, Ahmed Essop, Njabulo S Ndebele, Peter Wilhelm, Sindiwe Magona, Marlene van Niekerk, and Ivan Vladislavić, among them. Translations ensure representation in English of South Africa’s cultural diversity.

This diversity is reflected in the storytelling imagination. The oral tale co-exists with the colonial yarn, the shebeen sketch with the story of irony and implication. The apartheid landscape yields to current challenges of a society re-inventing itself to retell its story, or stories. In the short story – Michael Chapman says in his Introduction – ‘this country has an achievement of which to be justifiably proud.’ You are invited to enjoy a good read!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Chapman is also the compiler of The New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). He is professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His numerous publications include Southern African Literatures (1996; 2003) and Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006).

Omnibus of a Century of South African Short Stories - Michael Chapman Jonathan Ball Publishers ISBN-10: 0868522333 ISBN-13: 9780868522333 Trade Paperback 900 pages R250.00

“‘There is no easy way to put it but this is what happened. No one else was at home except Joseph and Anna who were in the kitchen getting supper ready…Dad got up to unlock the gate for them to go…Then they heard the first shots that killed Dad at the gate. They heard Nan scream and the dogs going crazy. Then there were more shots. They carried Nan out the back and hid under some old sheets of corrugated iron behind the sheds while the terrorists shot the dogs and hunted around in the house for her. Joseph said they could hear the dogs yelping as they died. They could hear them laughing and fooling around on the piano before they smashed it. Nan died as they waited… At the gate one of them stopped and spat on Dad’s body where he lay. Then they disappeared…Sorry to write this. It’s a shit business I know. But I thought you would want to know what happened. Just as well you’re in Australia and not here to wake up to reality.’

I pause at the graves of my parents. The graves I have never seen. There is one headstone for the two of them…Closing my eyes, I pay belated respects. An image comes to mind of Joseph and Anna carrying Nan out the house and hiding. Surely Nan was bleeding heavily – how did they prevent a trail of blood? I shake my head, dispelling yet another question I don’t want answered.”

The Book
When Vaughn Bourke returns home after twenty six years it is to exhume the graves of his family from their farm, Hopelands, and to relocate them to a churchyard in Shangani where they’ll be safe. He leaves behind him a failed life in Australia – his marriage and professional life in tatters. While he knows the farm is under threat of seizure he has no idea of the nightmare that awaits him in a country where violence and anarchy have replaced the idyll he remembers from his childhood. Together with his siblings, Gus and Angela, he begins the arduous task of removing the remains of his forebears from their family soil. But the exhumations soon uncover a terrible event of the past that becomes a prelude to an even greater tragedy in which loss of life and land is the only outcome.

The Author
Graham’s place of birth is Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. A Master of Fine Art graduate from Rhodes University, he taught in various South African institutions before emigrating to Australia in 1990. He is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle. An accomplished artist, Graham has exhibited widely in South Africa, Europe and Australia. Clouds like Black Dogs was his first novel.

“The idea for Place of Birth first emerged during visits to Zimbabwe in 2000 and 2003, in the wake of the first farm seizures. The misery and despair inflicted upon all Zimbabweans by Robert Mugabe’s regime seemed to be defined, in part, by loss of land and identity – of place. Despite having emigrated to Australia, I have always believed that I have been shaped by Africa. Hence, my sense of identity was profoundly challenged by Robert Mugabe’s persistent reference to Zimbabwe’s whites as foreigners. The farm seizure crisis brought home to me the tenuousness of life in Africa, and the terrible price still being paid for staking claim to territory.” Graham Lang, May 2006

Comments on the Book
"Cause and effect. There is always cause, some will argue. But how easily does cruelty born of injustice turn into cruelty born of itself.

And how inevitable is the day when effect becomes cause. When new hatreds will need expression..."

Graham Lang's second novel is nothing short of astonishing. There will be moments that you will be forced to stop and catch your breath. Soon, everybody will be talking about it.

Ann Harries says:
“Graham Lang taps into the ironies of the white African nightmare with prose as spare and self-deprecating as Coetzee's.”

We say:
Graham Lang’s Place of Birth will leave you in awe of a writing talent whose time has come.

Graham will be in South Africa for the release of Place of Birth - Johannesburg 26 & 27 June and Cape Town 28 & 29 June.

Having left South Africa as a child, a young man returns to visit the farm he has inherited from his mother. At the same time the visit is an attempt to rediscover a world he only vaguely remembers, and to uncover anything that could help him achieve a better understanding of his heritage, and of his mother in particular. However, he is faced with an irrevocably changed reality, one with barely any resemblance to the past embedded in his memory.

The Promised Land has become totally strange to him. In The Promised Land, Karel Schoeman describes the rural world he has depicted with such intimacy and insight in previous works. This remarkable novel will resonate in contemporary South Africa as chillingly as it did when it was first published thirty years ago.

Originally published in Afrikaans under the title Na die geliefde land, Promised Land was hailed as
‘…a brilliant piece of work’ and ‘…a masterpiece of low-key writing, understatement, allegory and subtle innuendo’.

Karel Schoeman was born in South Africa in 1939. He is a prolific author and has received many of the highest literary awards in South Africa, including the CNA Literary Prize in 1973 for Promised Land and the Hertzog Prize for Literature.

Ramoutsa Road is representative of the entire spectrum of the writing of Herman Charles Bosman over a period of 30 years. Many of the stories in this collection were rescued from long-forgotten magazines and journals and have been published for the first time.

There are some Oom Schalk Lourens stories, veld stories, a prison story and some ‘In the Voorkamer’ pieces, which were originally written for the now defunct The Forum. This selection was compiled by Valerie Rosenberg, who also provided an introduction and notes relating to each story. Ramoutsa Road is indeed vintage Bosman.