When Chabani Manganyi published the first edition of selected letters twenty-five years ago as a companion volume to Exiles and Homecomings: A Biography of Es’kia Mphahlele, the idea of Mphahlele’s death was remote and poetic. The title, Bury Me at the Marketplace, suggested that immortality of a kind awaited Mphahlele, in the very coming and going of those who remember him and whose lives he touched. It suggested, too, the energy and magnanimity of Mphahlele, the man, whose personality and intellect as a writer and educator would carve an indelible place for him in South Africa’s public sphere. That death has now come and we mourn it. Manganyi’s words at the time have acquired a new significance: in the symbolic marketplace, he noted, ‘the drama of life continues relentlessly and the silence of death is unmasked for all time’. The silence of death is certainly unmasked in this volume, in its record of Mphahlele’s rich and varied life: his private words, his passions and obsessions, his arguments, his loves, hopes, achievements, and yes, even some of his failures. Here the reader will find many facets of the private man translated back into the marketplace of public memory. Despite the personal nature of the letters, the further horizons of this volume are the contours of South Africa’s literary and cultural history, the international affiliations out of which it has been formed, particularly in the diaspora that connects South Africa to the rest of the African continent and to the black presence in Europe and the United States. This selection of Mphahlele’s own letters has been greatly expanded; it has also been augmented by the addition of letters from Mphahlele’s correspondents, among them such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Nadine Gordimer. It seeks to illustrate the networks that shaped Mphahlele’s personal and intellectual life, the circuits of intimacy, intellectual inquiry, of friendship, scholarship and solidarity that he created and nurtured over the years. The letters cover the period from November 1943 to April 1987, forty-four of Mphahlele’s mature years and most of his active professional life. The correspondence is supplemented by introductory essays from the two editors, by two interviews conducted with Mphahlele by Manganyi and by Attwell’s insightful explanatory notes.

This first full biography of South African novelist Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, is based on exclusive access to unpublished manuscripts, love letters, and diary extracts. It paints a complex and color portrait of a passionate man and of life in South Africa, with a fascinating history of the rise, and fight against, apartheid. Photos.

This book seeks to convince a younger generation that belief in an afterlife has a firm foundation, and that it springs from faith in God. Hints and guesses are gleaned from poets, artists and musicians; the witness of Scripture explored:and the communion of saints - a neglected teaching - emphasised. The late Frederick Levison was a parish minister for over forty years and was the husband of Revd Mary Levison DD who pioneered the ordination of women in the Church of Scotland.

Derek Mahon (1941–2020) is widely recognized as one of the most important Irish poets of his generation. This collection of new critical essays offers an important retrospective assessment of the nature of his poetic achievement. Bringing together many leading scholars of modern and contemporary Irish poetry, including a notable number of accomplished poet-critics, its contributors range widely across Mahon’s body of work. Their essays offer fresh considerations of the biographical, geographical and literary contexts that shaped his poetic voice. This includes paying attention not only to more familiar influences but also to previously little considered interlocutors. The stylistic and formal achievement of his voice is re-evaluated in ways that range from attentive close readings to considerations of his controversial practice of self-revision, and his engagements with music and experiments in translation. The politics of a poet often misleadingly considered apolitical are also reframed to take in the engagements of his early work through to the ecocritical commitment of his later poetry. Indeed, a notable aspect of this book is the consideration it gives to all the phases of Mahon’s career. As a whole, the collection opens up many new ways of reading and understanding Mahon’s important body of work.