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/ 6 November 2007
Why are readers so stuck on series? Do we count the cast as personal friends or are we longing for the familiar in a world out of control? Whatever the reason, the authors of crime novels tend to be caught in a web of their own spinning, unable to jettison a likeable or interesting protagonist and create something different.
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/ 6 November 2007
Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neoliberal cult of the free market.
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/ 6 November 2007
Until the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the post-colonial world had never witnessed, in terms of primitive brutality, a tragedy in which a million people (Tutsis) were killed in just 12 weeks by their foes (Hutus). Yet, a lesser known, equally harrowing war took place between 1967 and 1970 following the decision by Nigeria’s south-eastern region to secede from the federal state.
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/ 6 November 2007
"Crime writing sells all over the world," says Jill van Zyl, a director of Exclusive Books, South Africa’s largest book retailer. "International crime writers sell very well in South Africa. From a bookseller’s point of view, you can compare crime writing with cookery books. People buy cookbooks in great numbers and yet everybody goes out for dinner!
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/ 6 November 2007
The MD of Struik, Steve Connelly, was quoted by Celean Jacobs in her very
interesting article (No woman, no cry, Sunday Times, June 11 2006) as
saying that their new imprint of Oshun, "wanted to access the book-club market, which is mainly women". And, he continued, "… trying to create an environment where authors who happen to be women are writing for readers who largely happen to be women".
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/ 6 November 2007
As a teenager I found a book by Elizabeth Hand called the Aestival Tide. It was a bizarre and terrifying vision of the future, blighted by nuclear disaster and man’s own monstrosity; a book that I couldn’t forget although I never found anything else by Hand … until now that is, writes Lynley Donnelly.
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/ 6 November 2007
Cyril Ramaphosa is the candidate most suitable to become the next president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman said on Tuesday. Suzman, an MP for more than three decades — much of that time as the only voice in Parliament against the apartheid — was speaking a day before her 90th birthday on Wednesday.
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/ 6 November 2007
The end of the world didn’t bother Michael Stipe much, but three authors beg to differ. In new novels by Max Brooks, Garth Nix and Sarah Hall, the apocalypse — or a close facsimile thereof — has come and gone, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces.
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/ 6 November 2007
Given how little we know about William Shakespeare’s life, an awful lot has been written on the subject. Of course the plays and poems produce a seemingly endless amount of commentary and interpretation and reinterpretation, but the hard facts of his life are few and far between. As Bill Bryson writes: ”Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an Âacademic obsession.”
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/ 5 November 2007
If there is one certainty in turbulent times in good old Mzansi, then it’s the black male’s fascination with white balls. For such an oft-studied species, one wonders why the social anthropologists don’t include this crucial racial marker in their monographs. Yet it’s been there all along — right up there with inyama (and bringing it home), writes Khadija Bradlow.