Archive for the ‘Short Stories’ Category
by Amy on May 8th, 2013
Nelia Vivier from Get It Cape Town caught up with Liesl Jobson to discuss her newly released collection of short stories, Ride the Tortoise. Describing Jobson as a “raconteur of sexuality”, Vivier asked about her candid style of flash fiction, which Jobson said “is about holding the moments”.
They also spoke about the recent surge of popularity in erotic fiction, spurred on by 50 Shades of Grey, with Jobson commenting that she appreciates how “it gave women permission to say, ‘This is what I like’, ‘That makes me feel good’, ‘This is what I want you to do to me’.”
The long-awaited short-story collection, Ride the Tortoise by the queen of flash fiction, Liesl Jobson of Plumstead, is on the shelves. Nelia Vivier gets up close and personal with the author who is internationally acclaimed for her mastery of palm-of-the-hand stories.
Out on the open sea, cold and wet, you catch the spray, the backsplash made by the person in front. It is the meticulous clockwork of a team, as you ride into the wind, over the wave. There is no time to think, only to focus, on the position of your shoulder, the movement of your arm, the turning of the wrist … 17 points in one cycle, experiencing rhythm and precision, like each note of a musical symphony. Knowing at any minute the elemental sea can swallow you whole. In reality, we always come home.
Mfuneko Toyana from the Wits Vuvuzela attended a reading by Jobson at the Wartenweiler Library’s Writing Center last week and commented on how her writing offers readers “the disjointed, jarring confrontations with the self; with the elusive inner being”.
Liesel Jobson writes with an intense, explicit sense of self-awareness that almost overpowers the reader who picks up her book – if not the author herself.
She admitted as much to the audience in a reading of her latest collection of short stories, Ride the Tortise, at the Wartenweiler Library’s Writing Center on Wednesday evening.
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by Amy on May 2nd, 2013
At the recent launch of her new short story collection, Ride the Tortoise, at The Book Lounge in Cape Town, Liesl Jobson read from a section of the book in which a selection of her erotic flash fiction had been brought together.
Watch the video of her reading “The Science of Curves”:
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by Amy on Apr 30th, 2013
Liesl Jobson first became aware of the “the power of bearing witness to one’s own experience” at age 14, when her family moved to Connecticut and she set to writing letters about her life there.
“Writing is a means of making sense of it all,” Jobson told Penny Haw in an interview for Business Day, and this is exactly what she does in her recently released short story collection, Ride the Tortoise:
WHEN she was 14 years old, Liesl Jobson and her family moved from Cape Town to New Canaan, Connecticut, for 18 months. Several successful movies, including The Stepford Wives and Revolutionary Road, were made in New Canaan. It was also where Jobson discovered her love and talent for writing.
“While living there, I realised how much I liked to tell people what was happening to me in letters,” she says. “I loved writing letters and I loved getting letters. But I recognised that I was far more interested in what I was writing to people than what they were writing back. I guess that’s when I first came to an understanding of the power of bearing witness to one’s own experience. It’s when you tell your own story that you learn to understand what has really happened. Even if you don’t put the full spiel out there, writing is a means of making sense of it all.”
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by Amy on Apr 16th, 2013
Liesl Jobson, well-known on the local literary scene as the “queen of flash fiction” launched a collection of longer short stories, Ride the Tortoise, to a rapt crowd at The Book Lounge on Thursday.
“Flash fiction is my natural way of making sense of the world,” Jobson said in conversation with novelist Margie Orford. “But I noticed that I was flashing around certain reoccurring themes.” She combined some of these shorter pieces around similar topics into longer stories, which now form part of Ride the tortoise.
Orford said that Jobson’s short stories are excellent and stripped down to their essence. She compared Jobson’s style to “two skeletons next to each other, stripped down, with only their two hearts left”.
Jobson revealed that she had mined personal experiences to write her stories, but that, at the same time, she did not want to expose her loved ones too much. “I’m just glad they’re still speaking to me,” she joked.
Orford quizzed Jobson on the background to certain stories, for example the one with which the book opens, about a bassoon player in the police. Jobson said that she had really been a flute player in a township police band. The cross-cultural atmosphere in which she worked for two years was superb material for a story. As a crime writer, Orford said that she was jealous of Jobson’s apt description of the police station.
For the title story, “Ride the Tortoise”, Jobson drew on her experience of her firstborn baby’s illness while they were on a trip, staying in an old castle in the unforgiving Namibian landscape. The story about a friendship that forms between two women when the one teaches the other to row and the tale of a pet parrot that gets eaten are both also based on real events.
Although the spark for the stories came from Jobson’s own life, they are all fictional. Jobson emphasised the universal nature of themes she writes about, saying that anyone who has shared similar emotional experiences will be able to relate to Ride the Tortoise.
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Carolyn Meads livetweeted from the launch using the hashtag #livebooks:
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by Amy on Mar 28th, 2013
Jacana invites you to the launch of Liesl Jobson’s new collection of short stories Ride the Tortoise at The Book Lounge on 11 April at 5:30 PM, and at Kalk Bay Books on 16 April at 7 PM.
She will be in conversation with Margie Orford at The Book Lounge, and with Karin Schimke at Kalk Bay Books.
See you there!
The Book Lounge launch
Kalk Bay Books launch
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by Amy on Mar 11th, 2013
Jacana Media is pleased to invite you to join Liesl Jobson as she launches her new collection of short stories, Ride the Tortoise, at various venues and events around the country.
Starting on Thursday 11 April, Jobson will be at The Book Lounge in Cape Town, where she’ll be chatting to Margie Orford and at Kalk Bay Books on Tuesday 16 April, where Karin Schimke will join her in conversation.
On Tuesday 30 April, she will head up to Johannesburg and the Wits Writing Centre, where Jo-Anne Richards will talk with her. On Love Books on Thursday 2 May, she will be chatting to Arja Salafranca. Lastly, Jobson will be at the Franschhoek Literary Festival on Friday 17 May, where she will take part in a panel discussion with Gareth Crocker and Jill Nudelman.
See you there!
Thursday, 11 April 2013
Tuesday, 16 April 2013
Tuesday, 30 April 2013
Thursday, 02 May 2013
- Time: 6:00 PM
- Venue: Love Books,
The Bamboo Lifestyle Centre,
53 Rustenburg Road,
Melville,
Johannesburg | Map
- Guest speaker: Arja Salafranca
- RSVP: kate@lovebooks.co.za, 011 726 7408
Friday, 17 May 2013
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by Amy on Feb 25th, 2013
Jacana Media has shared a flipping preview of Liesl Jobson’s new collection of longer short stories, Ride the Tortoise.
In the preview, you get to read the first two stories in the collection. “The Edge of the Pot” is set at a police station in Diepkloof, Soweto. In “Still Life in the Art Room”, the art teacher, Dalila tries to makes sense of her history as a child of activists as she grieves her mother’s death.
This book has been published by the Jacana Literary Foundation (JLF), which seeks to promote and foster excellent writing from South and southern Africa, and to advance the writing of fiction in the region. This has been enabled by generous funding from the Multi-Agency Grants Initiative (MAGI)
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by Amy on Feb 19th, 2013
New from Jacana, Ride the Tortoise by Liesl Jobson:
In this long-awaited collection, Liesl Jobson, internationally acclaimed for her mastery of the very short “flash fiction” form, turns to the longer form of the short story. In places, the author experiments with the narrative structure by crafting together snapshots in a collage form. Elsewhere, she retains the more conventional story line.
She writes with panache and hypnotic honesty about topics as diverse as anorexia, cleaning the oven, the terror of losing a child, exile, infidelity and desire. Few writers are as assured in traversing the terrain of loss and fear. Yet there is quirky humour and sly surprise in these stories told from the perspectives of the policewoman, art teacher, athlete, bassoonist, lover and mother. Treat yourself: these dark chocolate and bitter orange stories are erotic, edgy and wise.
About the author
Liesl Jobson is South Africa’s queen of the flash fiction form, and won the Ernst van Heerden Award for 100 Papers, her debut collection. Her poetry and short works have been published in numerous local and international journals. A contributing editor to Books LIVE, she also edits the South African domain of Poetry International. She has two children, rows on the ocean, and plays the bassoon. This is her first collection of longer short stories.
This book has been published by the Jacana Literary Foundation (JLF), which seeks to promote and foster excellent writing from South and southern Africa, and to advance the writing of fiction in the region. This has been enabled by generous funding from the Multi-Agency Grants Initiative (MAGI)
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by Amy on Nov 20th, 2012
New from Jacana, Ystervarkrivier: A Slice of Life by Andy Capostagno with illustrations by Dr Jack:
This delightful collection of humorous stories is set in the mythical village of Ystervarkrivier (Ace-Turf-Arc-Riff-Ear) – a forgotten outpost of the Drakeniqua Municipality, somewhere in South Africa. The village has a church, a bottle store and a golf course, but not necessarily in that order.
The central motif is the nine-hole golf course built by a displaced Yorkshireman, Harry Corkaby. The stories detail Harry’s attempts to understand South Africa in the post-apartheid years and to make money for his retirement by encouraging people to play on his folly. The action is contemporary, reflecting current events such as Tiger’s divorce, Seve’s death and Louis Oosthuizen’s Open Championship, but the setting is timeless, a pastoral South Africa with little racial tension.
The rural setting allows incursions by such oddities as a one-eyed ostrich, a troop of violent baboons, Nguni cattle being fattened up for lobola and the eponymous porcupine (“Ystervark” means Porcupine in Afrikaans).
Meet the richest man in the area, Inkosi Dlamini, as well as the poorest, Thabiso ‘Joseph’ Tshabalala, Harry’s employee, and the rest of the entertaining cast – Ambrose Papenfus (bookworm and proprietor of the bottle store), Jannie Venter (the local sheep farmer; as strong as an ox and almost half as nice smelling), Frikkie Venter (teenage son of Jannie; rather more in love with golf than with his girlfriend, Marietje de Bruyn), Beulah de Bruyn (sturdily built, middle-aged cattle farmer who keeps her daughter chaste), S’bu Dlamini (foppish heir to the separate fortunes of his divorced parents, Inkosi Dlamini and Edna Gqobo-Dlamini, Mayor of the Drakeniqua Municipality) and Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar Pietersen (soldiers of fortune, down on their luck and, most Saturday nights, down on their knees).
This is farming country with a very small and spread out population, but the community comes together to pray and play golf.
About the author
Andy Capostagno was born in Bath, England and that was just his first mistake. He joined BBC Radio Bristol in 1986 and this year he is celebrating 26 years in the broadcasting industry. But nobody else is. Andy moved to South Africa in 1992 to escape the evils of Thatcherism. He is best known for his television commentary work on rugby and cricket for Supersport, but spends most of his time on his farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands attempting to avoid manual labour.
About the illustrator
Dr Jack is South Africa’s premier illustrator lending his learned line to publications as widely removed as Farmer’s Weekly and the Mail & Guardian. He is a noted twitcher, producing two seminal and lavishly illustrated books on South African birds. A third volume is currently in the pipeline. He lives in Plaston on the edge of the Kruger Park where he ruminates in his studio and collects vehicles that don’t work.
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by Amy on Sep 11th, 2012
Jacana Media releases the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing anthology, African Violet:
Nigeria’s Rotimi Babatunde has won the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for his short story entitled “Bombay’s Republic” from Mirabilia Review Vol. 3.9 (Lagos, 2011).
The Chair of Judges, Bernardine Evaristo MBE, announced Rotimi Babatunde as the winner of the £10 000 prize at a dinner held on Monday, 2 July at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Bernardine Evaristo said: “‘Bombay’s Republic’ vividly describes the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. It is ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”
Rotimi Babatunde’s fiction and poems have been published in Africa, Europe and America in journals which include Die Aussenseite des Elementes and Fiction on the Web and in anthologies including Little Drops and A Volcano of Voices. He is a winner of the Meridian Tragic Love Story Competition organised by the BBC World Service and his plays have been staged and presented by institutions which include the Halcyon Theatre, Chicago and the Institute for Contemporary Arts. He is currently taking part in a collaboratively produced piece at the Royal Court and the Young Vic as part of World Stages for a World City. Babatunde lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Also shortlisted were:
Billy Kahora (Kenya) “Urban Zoning” from McSweeney’s Vol. 37 (San Francisco, 2011)
Stanley Kenani (Malawi) “Love on Trial” from For Honour and Other Stories published by eKhaya/Random House Struik (Cape Town, 2011)
Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe) “La Salle de Départ” from Prick of the Spindle Vol. 4.2 (New Orleans, June, 2010)
Constance Myburgh (South Africa) “Hunter Emmanuel” from Jungle Jim Issue 6, (Cape Town, 2011)
The panel of judges is chaired by Bernardine Evaristo, the award-winning author of six books of fiction and verse fiction. Her new novel, Mr Loverman, will be published by Penguin in 2013. She is a literary critic, teaches creative writing at Brunel University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.
Alongside Bernardine on the panel of judges this year are cultural journalist Maya Jaggi; Zimbabwean poet, songwriter and writer Chirikure Chirikure; Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC Samantha Pinto; and the Sudanese CNN television correspondent Nima Elbagir.
Once again the winner of the £10 000 Caine Prize will be given the opportunity of taking up a month’s residence at Georgetown University, as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. The award covers all travel and living expenses. The winner will also be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September 2012 and events hosted by the Museum of African Art in New York in November 2012.
Last year the Caine Prize was won by Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo. She has subsequently been awarded the highly regarded two-year Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University, in the United States and her debut novel, We Need New Names, is forthcoming from Little, Brown in North America and Chatto and Windus in the UK.
Previous winners are Sudanese Leila Aboulela (2000), Nigerian Helon Habila (2001), Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (2003), Zimbabwean Brian Chikwava (2004), Nigerian Segun Afolabi (2005), South African Mary Watson (2006), Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007), South African Henrietta Rose-Innes (2008), Nigerian EC Osondu (2009) and Sierra Leonean Olufemi Terry (2010).
The Caine Prize, awarded annually for African creative writing, is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3 000 to 10 000 words). An “African writer” is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African.
The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, are patrons of The Caine Prize, as is Chinua Achebe, winner of the Man Booker International Prize. Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is President of the Council, Ben Okri OBE is Vice President, Jonathan Taylor CBE is the Chairman and Ellah Allfrey OBE is the Deputy Chairperson.
The stories written at Caine Prize workshops are published annually alongside the Prize’s shortlisted stories by New Internationalist (UK), Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), and this year’s new co-publishers: Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana), FEMRITE (Uganda), and Bookworld Publishers (Zambia). Books are available from the publishers or from the Africa Book Centre, African Books Collective or Amazon.
The Caine Prize is principally sponsored by The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Booker Prize Foundation, Weatherly International plc, China Africa Resources, CSL Stockbrokers and Miles Morland. Other funders include the British Council, The Beit Trust, The Thistle Trust, the Royal Overseas League and Kenya Airways.
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