Home

BLACK GHOST BOOKS

About

Black Ghost Books is an independent publisher of radical African art & writing.

'They say the Black Ghost is weak
That it is feeble and cannot go the distance
I say that’s their wishful thinking...
No, I know the Black Ghost.
It has led to many victories
In the pitch darkness of dispossession;
I can sit back and watch the screen
of Black Thoughts
In which Black success is focused...'

- Mafika Gwala

Black Ghost Books are available at the bookshops and outlets below:

LitCulture, 29 Chiswick, Brixton, Johannesburg

Love Books, 53 Rustenburg Road, Melville, Johannesburg

Bridge Books, 89 Helen Joseph St, Marshalltown, Johannesburg

Book Circle Capital, 75 4th Ave, Melville, Johannesburg

Book Lounge, 71 Roeland St, Cape Town

Clarke’s Bookshop 199 Long Street Cape Town

Deep South Publishing, Makhanda

Ponelopele Reading Club and Library, Polokwane

Con

Email

blackghostbooks [at] gmail [dot] org

Follow

books

Books

Anchor 1

Between Dlhadlha Bottlestore & Dube hostel

Where ‘when the fires go down the dying begins’

old carcasses rise

Rampolokeng writes from the hour after ignition—
the false calm, the smoke-hang, the long reckoning— When the fires go down…

Hardy moves through holes—
in bodies, in memory, in love, in the earth—
finding strange, liberatory absences.

greyheart

"Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost" Albert Ayler

At once poetry and an ars poetica, a novel and its undoing, songlike and shattered, greyheart attacks language's fissures to explode its most enigmatic dualisms: the sublime and the monstrous, love and hate, freedom and enslavement, black and white.

Jah Hills

Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa's gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today. A breathless journey, at once fevered and visionary, it invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.

A Half Century Thing

Published in 2015, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday and a quarter of a century after his debut Horns for Hondo (1990), Lesego Rampolokeng's A Half Century Thing is a devoted heresy, a sermon on the word, on politics and aesthetics that challenges what poetry does, what it can do, even what it is willing to address as a form.