South Africa: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Isabel Balseiro and Tobias Hecht, is a collection of must-read short stories from a wide range of South African writers, among them Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, and BOOK SA’s own Rustum Kozain (read an excerpt from his contribution here).
Here’s an entertaining gloss of the book from traveler Antonia Malchik:
More than once I have found myself in a foreign place with the wrong book. I’ll have brought History of the Arab Peoples to Russia, or an Emma Lathen mystery novel to Britain. Or Proust to a beach holiday on Grand Cayman (that was a huge mistake). Wherever it is, I get there and realize that the only thing I want to be reading is something that echoes the place and people I’m seeing around me.
So I was excited to be sent the Whereabouts Press Traveler’s Literary Companion to South Africa. Not that I’m going to South Africa anytime soon, but it served as an introduction to a series of books that focus on giving travelers a deeper sense of a place through its best writing, both past and present.
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