The Short Story in South Africa

This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000.

The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional.

The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The short story in South Africa – new trends and perspectives

Corinne Sandwith, Rebecca Fasselt and Khulukazi Soldati-Kahimbaara

2. “Translated from the dead”: The legibility of violence in Ivan Vladislavić’s 101 Detectives

Kirby Manià

3. Coloured by history, shaped otherwise: A "decolonial" reading of Zoë Wicomb　

Aretha Phiri

4. Hyper-compression and the rise of the deep surface: Flash fiction in "post-transitional" South Africa

Peter Blair

5. Queer temporalities in two short stories by Makhosazana Xaba: The afterlife of Can Themba’s "The Suit"　

Cheryl Stobie

6. Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction

Sally Ann Murray

7. Therianthropic power in Mohale Mashigo’s speculative short fiction

Christiaan Naudé

8. Navigating the spectacular in queer African erotic short fiction

Jenny Boźena du Preez

9. Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s "Poison" and NoViolet Bulawayo’s "Hitting Budapest"

Aghogho Akpome

10. On reading, writing and being read: Journeying with the short story

Makhosazana Xaba

11. Short stories born from the womb of the past

Siphiwo Mahala

12. "Concrete fragments": An interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes

Graham K. Riach

13. LongStorySHORT: Decolonising the reading landscape – A conversation with Kgauhelo Dube

Corinne Sandwith, Khulukazi Soldati-Kahimbaara and Rebecca Fasselt

14. "My stories will remain written the way I talk": A conversation with Niq Mhlongo

Rebecca Fasselt and Corinne Sandwith