Zebra

It’s official! The much-anticipated compilation Home Away will be published by Zebra Press next month. Watch out for a special series related to the book on the Zebra Press blog starting next week – it will be “24″ with a twist!

Being South African isn’t as black and white as it used to be. People from all over the world make South Africa their home, while South Africans have more geographic freedom than ever before. This unique and captivating collection is a snapshot of South African writing today: emigrant and immigrant South Africans, living at home and away.

In Home Away, twenty-four chapters by twenty-four writers, set in cities all around the world, make up one global day, a mosaic reflecting on the nature of home. As the provocative stories in this collaboration suggest, often it’s when we are far away from home that we see it most clearly.

About the authors

The collaborators on Home Away are: Lauren Beukes, Ted Botha, Sarah Britten, Victoria Burrows, Richard de Nooy, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Louis Greenberg, Colleen Higgs, Liesl Jobson, Rustum Kozain, Sarah Lotz, Jassy Mackenzie, Moky Makura, Helen Moffett, Naomi Nkealah, SA Partridge, Jo-Anne Richards, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Fiona Snyckers, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Ivan Vladislavić, Zukiswa Wanner, Kathryn White and Makhosazana Xaba.

Louis Greenberg is a freelance writer, editor and web designer. His first novel is the well-received The Beggars’ Signwriters, and he has published several stories, photographs and poems. He has lived in Johannesburg all his life, and much of his travel is vicarious.

Book details

• Home Away, edited by Louis Greenberg
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770220720
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Shown above: all 24 contributors

Random House Struik is pleased to invite you to browse the “beta” version of our brand-new website at www.randomstruik.co.za.

The new homepage has been some time in the making, but we hope you’ll agree that it’s been worth the wait. Features include a bright and beautiful books catalogue, a competitions section, comprehensive notices of RHS’s upcoming events, robust social media components and much more.

As you browse the site, please bear in mind that we’re still fleshing it out with book and author information, and that some features remain in test phase. We’re very excited about sharing it with you and hope you like what you see!

One item that you won’t find on the new homepage is the Oshun Books imprint. After taking a long, hard look at the overall Random House Struik publishing strategy, we took the extremely difficult decision to discontinue the imprint, and merge Oshun books into our leading publishing brand, Zebra Press. (On BOOK SA, the Oshun blog will soon be merged into the Zebra blog.) Current Oshun titles will continue to be sold as such, but future publications that would have appeared in the Oshun stable will now be released via Zebra Press. Random House Struik would like to extend its gratitude to all who worked on the Oshun imprint.

The debut of www.randomstruik.co.za represents a new chapter in the story of an African publishing powerhouse. We look forward to bringing you the best, most engaging, most informative reads via our five imprints, Struik Lifestyle, Struik Nature, Struik Travel and Heritage, Zebra Press and Umuzi, in 2010 and beyond!

Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was awarded the Noble Prize for Peace today, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.

The Swedish Academy’s Norwegian Nobel Committee said:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

• Press statement home
• 2009 Nobel Peace Prize home

Get to know the US President’s extraordinary gift for words with Henry Russell’s The Politics of Hope: The Words of Barack Obama, published by Zebra Press last year.

From childhood memories right up to his impassioned inaugural speech, this book puts the words that have captured the imagination of the American people and helped to make history in your hands.

Book details

• The Politics of Hope: The Words of Barack Obama by Henry Russell
  EAN: 9781770220614
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Photo courtesy Nobel.org

Andrew Brown’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize winner, Coldsleep Lullaby, has been published in Germany by BTB, an imprint of Random House/Bertelsmann, as Schlaf ein, mein Kind. Mechthild Barth is the translator, and her version of Brown’s brilliant thriller has been killing ‘em in Deutschland.

The book made it on the KrimiWelt Bestenliste, a list for the best new crime novels (German and translated), released by ARTE TV (a nationwide newspaper and radio station), debuting at number 9:

Zwei Handlungsstränge, die Brown parallel laufen lässt, ohne auf eine der beliebten „Verknüpfungen“ von „damals“ und „heute“ zu setzen. Zwei Stränge, die erst ganz am Ende des Buches miteinander zu tun haben – aber das weiß nur der Erzähler und damit der Leser; die Figuren wissen es nicht. Daraus entsteht eine grausame Pointe. So etwas ist ungewöhnlich, weil explizit literarisch, nicht genre-üblich.

• Complete review

And the book was reviewed on national radio last week (a summary of the German follows):

Ein paar hundert Jahre früher, im späten 17. Jahrhundert zur Zeit des berühmten holländischen Gouverneurs Simon van der Stel, Namensgeber von Stellenbosch, “Mischling” und Initiator des Weinanbaus am Kap: Eine junge Sklavin wird von einem für die Kolonie unersetzbaren Weinanbauspezialisten vergewaltigt und gedemütigt. Sie wehrt sich.

Zwei Handlungsstränge, die Brown parallel laufen lässt, ohne auf eine der beliebten “Verknüpfungen” von “damals” und “heute” zu setzen. Zwei Stränge, die erst ganz am Ende des Buches zusammenkommen – aber das weiß nur der Erzähler und damit der Leser; die Figuren wissen es nicht. Daraus entsteht eine grausame Pointe. So etwas ist ungewöhnlich, weil explizit literarisch, nicht genreüblich.

• Complete review

Says one of Zebra Press’ sources, the “review is extremely positive: ‘teriffic’, ‘very literary, very well written, like the stroke of a brush’, stating that [Coldsleep Lullaby] cleverly uses patterns of the crime novel but is not a typical crime novel… it’s brilliant how [Brown] – throughout the plot – looks at the characters through different focal widths with his complex literary lens… the reviewer [Thomas Wörtche, a very renowned crime novel expert in Germany] says: the fiction… stands for itself, is unique. And if we were looking for an author to compare it to, it would maybe be Patricia Highsmith”.

Well done to Brown – here’s hoping Coldsleep Lullaby keeps the whole nation of Germany awake at night!

Book details

• Coldsleep Lullaby by Andrew Brown
  EAN: 9781770071056
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Random House Struik announces the publication, this November, of Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black, the third part of a trilogy that the author (unknowingly) began with Country of My Skull and continued with A Change of Tongue.

Mixing memoir and history, philosophy and poetry, the book is stylistically experimental and personally courageous. Begging to Be Black is a welcome addition to Krog’s own oeuvre and to South African literary non-fiction.

In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Antjie Krog’s stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case.

From there the book ranges widely in scope, both in time – reaching back to the days of Basotho king Moshoeshoe – and in space – as we follow Krog’s experiences as a research fellow in Berlin, far from the Africa that produced her.

Available from all good bookstores from November 2009.
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We’re thrilled for author Bridget McNulty that the US edition of her first novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, has been selected by Cosmopolitan’s gargantuan online network as one of eight top summer “beach” reads.

Says Cosmo.com of the book:

You’ll love this sweet — but not sappy — book by the 25-year-old author, who was honored as a Fun Fearless Female in Cosmo South Africa.

• Find out more at Cosmo.com

Congratulations, Bridget!

Book details

• Strange Nervous Laughter by Bridget McNulty
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781770200623
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The countdown to the release of Touch: Stories of Contact by South African Writers this June has begun!

Zebra Press will bring you several delectable tasters from the twenty-plus stories in the collection, edited by Karina Magdalena Szczurek, between now and then. For more information on the book – which features fresh work from South Africa’s top writers – click here.

We begin with this excerpt from Caine Prize winner Henrietta Rose-Innes‘ short story, “Promenade”:
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Those who follow Bridget McNulty’s popular blog will know that her first novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, is due to be released in the USA very shortly.

To help potential readers get to know the book – which is about love, what love does to us, and how our lives are changed by being in love, out of love or on the brink of love – McNulty is posting a series of podcasts, starting this week, that introduce the book’s main characters. There will be a new podcast every Friday from now until the end of May.

But first, McNulty reads the novel’s prelude, which goes into the risks associated with love – and shopping:
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Sam Cowen, radio personality and author of the parenting guides Waiting for Christopher and Good Enough Mother, has a new one out. (That’s a new book, not baby.)

Co-authored with Lee van Loggerenburg, The Irreverent Mothers’ Handbook, takes the same humourous tone as Cowen’s previous books while still offering concrete advice.

Cowen answered a few questions pertaining to her life and personality recently – get to know this irreverent mother better:
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Plenty of South Africans would agree with the sentiment that this year’s election has been the most… interesting… since the first one in 1994.

If you’ve listened to the various political parties and their posturings, you’ve certainly heard about many tricksters, tyrants and turncoats among those hoping to attain high office next Wednesday.

Max du Preez – whose book, Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats, has nothing to do with the elections, we assure you – has been tightening up his predictions, suggesting that current polls may not give the best indication of where the parties will stand after the chips, that is, ballots, fall:
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