What I’m reading
DIANE AWERBUCK wrote
which was awarded the Commonwealth Best First Book Award (Africa and the Caribbean). Her work has been translated into Mandarin, German, Russian and Swedish. Awerbuck’s short stories are collected in
One of these, ‘Phosphorescence’, was shortlisted for the 2014 Caine Prize. Her short story, ‘Leatherman’, recently won the Short Story Day Africa competition. Awerbuck’s latest highbrow-horror novel is Home Remedies. Poetry and interviews are at http://aerodrome.co.za/tag/diane-awerbuck/, and her doctorate on trauma and humour is coming soon, right after she finishes her new spec/fic series, as Frank Owen, co-written with Alex Latimer.
I LOVE local short story anthologies, so I was violently pleased to find a couple of really good stories in the latest Short.Sharp.Stories collection, themed Incredible Journey. My favourite was Jumani Clarke’s Lift Club, which starts with a tow-truck driver and ends with an encounter in the underworld. It always astounds me how people make new stories out of ordinary things – and if those stories are funny and sad at the same time, that’s a bonus.
Last week I splashed out on David Crystal’s The Disappearing Dictionary, which is a list of quirky, culturally specific terms falling out of use in our lifetimes. People forget that English is a lingua franca, and it metamorphoses as we need it to do more, or fewer, or different, things. One of the most enjoyable experiences of reading is discovering a word for a feeling or idea that you’ve had but didn’t know how to say.
Next I’m going to bloody well read Claire Robertson’s The Magistrate of Gower, which I’ve been avoiding because it’s going to make me jealous.
The woman is the most balletic and precise – and warmhearted – writer we have, proof that you don’t have to be a jerk to be a grown-up.
Then, because it’s Christmas, I’ll get into uHlanga Press’s first three poetry publications: Matric Rage by Genna Gardini; Failing Maths and My Other Crimes by Thabo Jijana, and the myth of this is that we’re all in this together by the always-fantastic Nick Mulgrew.