Thando Njovane
@thandorasbox.bsky.social
Literature & Literary Theory, Trauma, Memory, Psychoanalysis, Childhoods, Intimacy | Co-director @findingafrica | Views are my own |
“Toni Morrison was funny as hell,” Namwali Serpell writes. “[She] makes no bones about making jest of incest, lynching, murder, even infanticide in many of her works.”
Toni Plays the Dozens | Namwali Serpell
What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?
nybooks.com
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes review – this final novel is a slippery affair
Memoir merges with fiction as the author reflects on failed love, ageing and the end of life in this last instalment to his writing career
theguardian.com
“I don’t know if I believe in signs. But in that moment, I needed one.” On the cycle of life, death, and birding.
Feather By Feather: On Life, Death, and Birding
A few days after my brother died, I sat in the living room of a dead house and made eye contact with a bird. It’d been raining that day: the world outside had been coated in a wet, pewter varnish,…
buff.ly
David Szalay’s “Flesh is an attempt to write richly about a hollow man, in that hollow man’s own impoverished language.” —Kevin Power https://go.nybooks.com/49DpGvp
All the Sad Unliterary Men | Kevin Power
David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.
nybooks.com
June Feature: “Humanity and endemic plastic” by Tessilim Adjayi More than an artistic exploration, this photo is a call to action against plastic pollution in African ecologies. It urges communities to reject plastic and adopt sustainable alternatives.
how would you describe this century so far 𝘢𝘭𝘭-𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 famously you have spoken of the uselessness of interviews 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘐 can you 𝘪𝘧 𝘸𝘦 I wanted to use the word ‘labyrinthine’ ‘Lieu Vague’, a poem by Anne Carson. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Anne Carson · Poem: ‘Lieu Vague’
lrb.co.uk
Last week, Cinema Africa hosted a screening of Fanon at Cineplex Bayreuth, followed by a discussion led by Thierry Boudjekeu and Marie Tsogo together with the film’s director, Jean-Claude Barny. Cinema Africa will be back in January 2026! @unibayreuth.bsky.social
Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature is in print! The paperback will be out in Feb. Please request that your library order a copy. 30% off with the discount code SNWF25. @sunypress.bsky.social @rcolesworthy.bsky.social sunypress.edu/Books/A/Anim...
Animist Poetics
sunypress.edu
I wrote this blogpost for @sunypress.bsky.social about the process of writing my book, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature, which is out now. sunypress.edu/Blog/2025/An...
Animism, in Theory
sunypress.edu
“I wasn’t in Paris to avenge my postcolonial trauma but that wasn’t NOT on the table, either.” Benedict Nguyen on (re)learning the colonizer’s language.
Paris Made My Cheeks Hurt: On Relearning the Colonizer’s Language
Moving to Paris made my cheeks hurt. After a decade since I’d last worked in France, I found myself back in the land of one of my ancestors’ other colonizers. My Broca’s area could still conjure th…
buff.ly
‘This is Helen Garner! A woman fluent in French, who compares translations of Rilke for fun. Like the protagonists of her novels, the writer of these diaries is a resourceful, socially skilled woman.’ Anne Enright (@thewrengirl.bsky.social) on the Australian novelist: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Anne Enright · I stab and stab: Helen Garner’s Diaries
The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle...
lrb.co.uk
‘Scribbled, scrawled, gauche, idle, unlovely – the hand is no one’s, or everyone’s, or mythic, or just a stain left behind by something written there before. You cannot get away from yourself in your own hand.’ Anne Carson in the next issue, online early: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Anne Carson · Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like...
lrb.co.uk
In his 1962 essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin dissects the mentality of white Americans: “not only overt racists but the sort likely to be well-meaning readers of The New Yorker,” Kevin Young writes.
Kevin Young on James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
The essay served as a definitive diagnosis of American race relations. Events soon gave it the force of prophecy.
newyorker.com
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” — the Creature in Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Wednesday Toast@wednesdaytoast.bsky.social · last yr.name THE hardest line in all of fiction.
@sarahemilyduff.bsky.social I’m chuffed you showed up on my timeline- mutual friends, perhaps?
