The Fossickers

The Fossickers

Author: Ramon L. Mills

Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing

Published: 2011-02

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 160976689X

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The Fossickers is an action-adventure novel involving the discovery of iron ore and gold by a small group of wildcat miners in the Great Eastern Desert of the Pilbara, located in the isolated north of Western Australia. The mining project is offered to a large London-based mining investment group. The scene then shifts from the Pilbara to London, where conspiracy by an opposition mining investment company arises. Chinese-backed financiers obtain the discovery data and attempt to control the project, taking it away from the London group. A small British security company is retained to recover the stolen data from the Chinese. In the aftermath, the original London investment company's executive and his wife are murdered. The scene shifts between England and Australia, describing the tough and isolated conditions of the miners, who call themselves The Fossickers. There is plenty of typical Australian bush humour, combined with a murder mystery that spans the globe. Who will end up controlling the mine? Ramon L. Mills is a retired international timber trader who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Publisher's website: http: //www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheFossickers.html


Zimbabwean Transitions

Zimbabwean Transitions

Author: Mbongeni Z. Malaba

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9042023767

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This collection of essays on Zimbabwean literature brings together studies of both Rhodesian and Zimbabwean literature, spanning different languages and genres. It charts the at times painful process of the evolution of Rhodesian/ Zimbabwean identities that was shaped by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial realities. The hybrid nature of the society emerges as different writers endeavour to make sense of their world. Two essays focus on the literature of the white settler. The first distils the essence of white settlers' alienation from the Africa they purport to civilize, revealing the delusional fixations of the racist mindset that permeates the discourse of the "white man's burden" in imperial narratives. The second takes up the theme of alienation found in settler discourse, showing how the collapse of the white supremacists' dream when southern African countries gained independence left many settlers caught up in a profound identity crisis. Four essays are devoted to Ndebele writing. They focus on the praise poetry composed for kings Mzilikazi and Lobengula; the preponderance of historical themes in Ndebele literature; the dilemma that lies at the heart of the modern Ndebele identity; and the fossilized views on gender roles found in the works of leading Ndebele novelists, both female and male. The essays on English-language writing chart the predominantly negative view of women found in the fiction of Stanley Nyamfukudza, assess the destabilization of masculine identities in post-colonial Zimbabwe, evaluate the complex vision of life and "reality" in Charles Mungoshi's short stories as exemplified in the tragic isolation of many of his protagonists, and explore Dambudzo Marechera's obsession with isolated, threatened individuals in his hitherto generally neglected dramas. The development of Shona writing is surveyed in two articles: the first traces its development from its origins as a colonial educational tool to the more critical works of the post-1980 independence phase; the second turns the spotlight on written drama from 1968 when plays seemed divorced from the everyday realities of people's lives to more recent work which engages with corruption and the perversion of the moral order. The volume also includes an illuminating interview with Irene Staunton, the former publisher of Baobab Books and now of Weaver Press.


While the Billy Boils

While the Billy Boils

Author: Henry Lawson

Publisher: Good Press

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13:

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While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson is about a family friend, a jolly old man named Billy. Excerpt: "You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as "An old mate of your father's on the diggings, Johnny." And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls—as the case may have been—and that we had our father's nose but our mother's eyes, or the other way about; and say that the baby was the dead spit of its mother, and then added, for father's benefit: "But yet he's like you, Tom."


Walking to Hollywood

Walking to Hollywood

Author: Will Self

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-08-03

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1408837730

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Walking to Hollywood is a dazzling triptych - obsessive, satirical, elegiac - in which Will Self burrows down through the intersections of time, place and psyche to explore some of our deepest fears and anxieties with characteristic fearlessness and jagged humour. 'Very Little' is ostensibly the account of a curative journey to Canada and the USA, but in fact the record of a nematode's progress, as the worm of obsession - with scale and packing and the 'stuff' of our lives - bores through a mind in extremesis. 'Walking to Hollywood' is an extreme satire on celebrity, in which the narrator believes that everyone he meets is played by a famous actor, and that only he can solve the mystery of who murdered the movies. 'Spurn Head' leads Self to a tormented sojourn with a madman whose house is sliding over the edge of a cliff, to a game of checkers with Death, and finally to an encounter with one of Swift's immortal Struldbruggs and a march through a tear in time itself. In Walking to Hollywood Will Self pushes memoir to the limits of invention.