“Three generations of white South African men were bound together at that table. Vermuelen was the first generation. He defined Africa, made it safe for Basson to defile. I was the last generation, the last to grow up in segregated neighborhoods. Between us was the silent photograph of Wouter Basson. Like a distant father, Basson was absent at the dining table.” – Henk Rossouw (Hole in the White ‘Hood). Also Mahmood Mamdani on Bantu Education at UCT, Gael Reagon on sisterhood, Binyavanga Wainaina on dis-covering Kenya, Gaston Zossou on African intellectuals and more…
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Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen
An Archaeology of Holes is an excavation and an evisceration of love, loneliness, alienation and what it means to be human. Working between fabulism, dark realism and autofiction, these stories propose the creative and liberatory possibilities of holes, which are everywhere: in bodies, in the ransacked earth, in erased lives and memories, in forgotten loves and lovers and the endless massacres. First published in French translation by Ròt- Bò-Krik (2022), then by Bridge Books in Chicago (2024), this South African edition brings what the Chicago Review of Book calls Hardy’s “uneasy, uncomfortable, and utterly unmissable” prose home.
"Through lenses both forensic and fantastic, Hardy holds up to her strange light the human body and the body politic. For fans of writers like Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Rikki Ducornet, Kathryn Davis, or Carmen Maria Machado, for fans of crossing the veil to slip off their skin and dancing around in their bones, of picking through their own trash, of rediscovering themselves after despair, heartbreak, and loneliness, Archaeology of Holes is a most perfect companion." (Danielle Pafunda, author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel, winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize).