THE LOSS LIBRARY

Non-Fiction (Essays)

Seagull Books - January 2012

"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job."

What happens when a story goes missing or remains unrecorded? When a writer carelessly gives his plot away during a conversation or dies before writing the ending? These stories end up in the Loss Library, where the books that have never been written are kept.
In this poignant, thought-provoking book, one of South Africa’s finest writers examines eleven of his own lost fictions, how the ideas arose and why he abandoned them. But this reflection on the art of writing is not a lament for unfinished work. Rather THE LOSS LIBRARY is a meditation on creativity, mortality and the allure of the incomplete.

DOUBLE NEGATIVE

Fiction (Literary Fiction) 204 pages

Umuzi / Random House SA - October 2010

Winner of the M-Net Award 2011, Winner of the University of Johannesburg Award 2010/2011, Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2011.

A haunting literary novel about photography and truth. Apartheid-era university dropout Neville Lister is in danger, his father thinks, of 'falling in with the wrong crowd' and so is sent to eminent photographer Saul Auerbach - 'a man with strong convictions, who's learned to direct them' - to gain some sense of perspective and purpose. And so begins a delicate, funny and beautifully written exploration of the art of depiction, of the haunting power of photographs, those 'odd little memorials that owe a lot to chance and intuition'. In three sections - 'Available Light', 'Dead Letters' and 'Small Talk' - this spare yet memorable novel tracks the changing face of Johannesburg and the crooked path of Neville's career. Through all these changes, that first day spent with Saul Auerbach, what he photographed and what they saw together, are things Neville will never forget. A brilliant meditation on our ways of seeing and recording, on how and what we remember, and the art of getting lost.

FLASHBACK HOTEL

Fiction (Literary Fiction) 285 pages

Umuzi / Random House SA - March 2010

Two sought-after collections of short stories by Ivan Vladislavic are brought together and made available again in this new volume. Vladislavic’s abilities as a master of understatement and brevity are brilliantly demonstrated in these stories from MISSING PERSONS (1989), for which he received the Olive Schreiner Prize, and PROPAGANDA BY MONUMENTS AND OTHER STORIES (1996), featuring the two stories that won him the Thomas Pringle Award.

PORTRAIT WITH KEYS

Non-Fiction (Essays) 199 pages

Portobello Books - October 17, 2006

Winner of the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize and the 2007 SA Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Prize.

W G Sebald meets Ian Sinclair on the streets of Johannesburg. One of South Africa’s finest literary voices shares his poetic passion for this dangerous, chaotic, ever-changing city.

PORTRAIT WITH KEYS was extracted in Granta and described by Geoff Dyer as: "Surely one of the most ingenious love letters - full of violence, fear, humour and cunning - ever addressed to a city. If Italo Calvino had grown up in Joburg and experienced both apartheid and its aftermath this is the kind of book he would have been proud to have written."