In one volume for the first time, the entire sequence of Bosman's famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories. Edited from authoritative sources, and accompanied by original illustrations, this gathering represents a feast of South Africa's best-loved tales. The sixty pieces include all-time favourites like In the Withaak's Shade, Makapan's Caves and Willem Prinsloo's Peach Brandy, the Boer War classics Mafeking Road and The Rooinek, as well as several lesser-known treasures.
This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.
This book is a foefie slide straight back to your youth in South Africa. Remember? When you wore bell bottoms and wound up cassette tapes with a Bic pen. When 'The World at War' was on TV and LM Radio played on the radiogram, and when there were call-up papers in the mailbox and 2 c stamps on letters. VW Beetles were everywhere, the Bay City Rollers were it, and the smell of Wintergreen filled the change rooms. On these pages, hundreds of the little things that made up the world for many in the 70s and 80s come to life in Trevor Romain's whimsical drawings and laugh-out-loud commentary. 'It's not inside, it's on top!' - or is it? In this book it's all inside. Enjoy the ride.
Herman Charles Bosman s unique account of the term he served as a young man in Pretoria Central Prison. Convicted for the murder of his step-brother, and initially condemned to hang, he had his sentence commuted to be a regular convict through the 1920s and into the 1930s."
Ruminating on what it means to achieve Zen in a continent that has experienced fear, injustice, and inspirational political revolution, this meditation is a refreshingly enlightening account of practicing Buddhism in a volatile and ever-changing South Africa. Reminiscent of Lau Tsu combined with Oom Schalk Lourens, this luminescent and contemplative guide to inner sanctum draws on the experience and knowledge of an advocate of human rights and a former Zen monk. Lightly musing on the abstract concepts of humility, acceptance, reconciliation, and love and layered with swirling emotion and poetic insight on the nature of mankind--especially in the face of seemingly impossible adversity--this deeply spiritual and often humorous journey is as full of heart as it is of wisdom and serves as a necessary yet gentle reminder of what it is to be human.
Twenty-two short stories from South Africa's greatest storyteller, exactly as he penned them. The stories, spun out as dialogues in the "voorkamer" or reception room of the post office int the Western Transvaal town of Bekkersdal, all contain Bosman's renowned soft humour, his unexpected twists and lurking social commentary. Those taking part in the conversations are a group of Marico farmers-Chris Welman, Gysbert van Tonder, who is known to be the biggest cattle smuggler in the district, At Naudé, who listens to the radio and reads the newspapers, Oupa Bekker, the oldest inhabitant of the district, and young Johnny Coen. And of course, the schoolmaster, young Vermaak, who often finds himself the butt of the others' remarks. In the course of these conversations, as points of view are expanded and elucidated, these people are brought with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies. Now with a glossary to explain Afrikaans words, phrases, and sayings to the present-day reader.
