Out of the Wreckage

Description

Dream parables and flash fiction exploring timeless contradictions and the nature of reality.

Johannesburg-based author Allan Kolski Horwitz is better known as a poet and an activist involved with several worker organizations, and here he unites these passions. His stories – parables, really – are cryptic and poetic, but all are driven by a deeper underlying social or political significance. Confident in its narration, compact, honest, and tonally subtle, this slender collection is notable for how it resonates beyond the most obvious borders of its form. Horwitz is consistently inventive. Each story averages just a couple of pages, making them easy to zip through. Don’t. –JP Bebey

Given that Allan Kolski Horwitz is a South African of east-European Jewish extraction whose mother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, it is unsurprising that his fiction explores such weighty themes as alienation, displacement and the role of the individual in the modern Africa state. But the charm o this collection of very short stories, written with deceptive simplicity and devoid of sentimentality or dogmatism, is that they highlight the individual and the personal, portraying a multiplicity of human predicaments .