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magazine: magazine

“Women have always written”: An interview with Magda Birkmann

In Rowohlt Verlag’s newly launched series, rororo Entdeckungen, Magda Birkmann and Nicole Seifert select novels by remarkable but forgotten female authors from the twentieth century for publication. Last week we had the pleasure of talking to Magda Birkmann about this series and the novel Daddy was a number runner (Eine Tochter Harlems) by Louise Meriwether.

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Nina Mingya Powles
Small Bodies of Water

In her collection of essays, we move with Powles between London, where she currently lives, Shanghai, China and Aotearoa-New Zealand. She talks about growing up in Wellington with the constant fear of a major earthquake, how she prepares her own tofu during the coronavirus lockdown, and her connection to the kōwhai tree.  

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M.G. Vassanji
The Magic of Saida

The Magic of Saida begins with a relatively familiar premise: a man returns to the country of his birth on a mission to find the woman he once loved. But this novel finally delivers a much more complex and tragic story than this starting point might suggest, offering a sweeping history of what is today Tanzania, from precolonial times to (almost) the present day.

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Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
House of Stone

Four years after its first publication, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s award-winning debut novel House of Stone has now been published by Interkontinental Verlag in the German translation of Simone Jakob. The weighty subject Tshuma chose for House of Stone is the Gukurahundi, the genocide in Zimbabwe that took place in the 1980s under Prime Minister Robert […]

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Moshtari Hilal
Hässlichkeit (Ugliness)

As readers of Moshtari Hilal’s book, we are allowed to accompany the sometimes painful process of coming to terms with what is constructed as ugly, in order to realize that ugliness is actually what is behind this construction.

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Ismat Chughtai
Lifting the Veil

Lifting the Veil is a title which carries implications spanning across western and eastern traditions. Consider the image of the veiled bride, a female figure condemned to lifelong possession. The veil is lifted to reveal the bride, for the pleasure of the male gaze. But in this collection of short stories, Ismat Chughtai turns that trope on its head.

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