a not-for-profit literary press dedicated to promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation
 
Intimate Stranger
published August 2009

Original Paperback:
Originally: $15.00
Online: $12.00
You save 20%!
ISBN 978-0-9800330-9-0


News & Events:

Breyten Breytenbach at Idlewild Books
11/8/2009
reading and conversation with Breyten Breytenbach
A Reading and Conversation with Breyten Breytenbach
10/15/2009
at Lillian Vernon Writing Center, NYU
Breyten Breytenbach speaking on Ryszard Kapuscinski
10/7/2009
After Kapuscinsk: The Art of Reportage in the 21st Century
Breyten Breytenbach in the Tryptich reading series
10/5/2009
at 11th Street Bar in Alphabet City

Addressed to a young writer, Intimate Stranger is an eclectic and generous work flowing with insight and wit. Breytenbach's candid and provocative reflections on reading and writing guide without guiding, open mental channels, surprise, and inspire. A stirring glimpse into the mind of an artist, Intimate Stranger is a river of experience and visions, brimming with sleights of tongue and overshifting in mood. This genre-defying gem makes manifest Einstein's assertion: "Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach." 

Breyten Breytenbach - "The Need to Retrace My Steps" from Le Monde

Interview with Breytenbach - "South Africa: The Great Disillusion" from Le Nouvel Observateur

"

In this inspiring, insightful and heart-warming meditation, Breyten Breytenbach has given us a masterpiece—a term I use with all due caution. He invites the reader into the process of poetry from vision to practice with a deep abiding humanity, genuine wisdom and compassionate good will spiced with humor. As unpretentious as a comfortable old shirt, this is a book to be read and reread, to be cherished by anyone who values the enlightenment found in great poetry of all kinds.

"
Sam Hamill
"

As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life.

"
J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
"

The greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as Breyten Breytenbach.

"
The New Yorker
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