Sky Birds Ravishers

“Sky-birds and Ravishers is a matter-of-fact account of an earthly Hell, a South African jail. Kheswa’s eye is unflinching: the horrors—of institutionalised rape and degradation—are told in a brisk, almost casual way, which renders them all the more immediate. It’s a dark, visceral read, with just a glimmer of hope at the end. Compelling, raw and memorable.” - Simon Maginn, Author of ‘Sheep’ 21-year-old, Sosobala NoZulu, is part of a notorious gang, called CMB, Cash Money Brothers, based in Durban. He lives a fast and reckless life, often involved in car theft, and bank robberies. When his girlfriend, Sandy Gumede is brutally raped, he decides to take the law in his own hands and kills the rapist, Sifiso Mkhize in cold blood, in the Westville Shopping Centre parking lot. Sosobala is arrested and found guilty and sentenced to a maximum of ten years imprisonment for the first-degree murder of Sifiso. He arrives at the Westville Prison and is recruited by Chopper to join the 26’s gang. He tows the line until a young man arrives in their cell and his abuse in the dead of night galvanises Sosobala to intervene, which results in a string of unintended consequences. Musa Kheswa is a reformed gangster and he wrote this book as a warning for the youngsters in the townships who idolise gangsters without realizing how bad life in South African prisons are.

We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation? Mrs. Aldwinkle, an English aristocrat of a certain age, has purchased a mansion in the Italian countryside. She wishes to bring a salon of intellectual luminaries into her orbit, and to that end she invites a strange cast of characters to spend time with her in her palazzo: Irene, her young niece; Ms. Thriplow, a governess-turned-novelist; Mr. Calamy, a handsome young man of great privilege and even greater ennui; Mr. Cardan, a worldly gentleman whose main talent seems to be the enjoyment of life; Hovenden, a young motorcar-obsessed lord with a speech impediment; and Mr. Falx, a socialist leader. To this unlikely cast is soon added Mr. Chelifer, an author with an especially florid, overwrought style that is wasted on his day job as editor of The Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette, and the Elvers, a scheming brother who is the guardian of his mentally-challenged sister. As this unlikely group mingles, they discuss a great many grand topics: love, art, language, life, culture. Yet very early on the reader comes to realize that behind the pompousness of their elaborate discussions lies nothing but vacuity—these characters are a satire of the self-important intellectuals of Huxley’s era. His skewering of their intellectual barrenness continues as the group moves on to a trip around the surrounding country, in a satire of the Grand Tour tradition. The party brings their English snobbery out in full force as they traipse around Rome, sure of nothing else except in their belief that Italy is culturally superior simply because it’s Italy. As the vacation winds down, we’re left with a biting lampoon of the elites who suppose themselves to be at the height of art and culture—the kinds of personalities that arise in every generation, sure of their own greatness but unable to actually contribute anything to the world of art and culture that they feel is so important.

Priscilla Musonda has no idea how she survived such a hard life, but she knows why. The survivor of a lifetime of sexual abuse, she has grown to serve as a beacon for other child victims. In Stolen Childhood, she shares chilling, detailed accounts of her life in Zambia as the sexual slave of her father. The abuse began when she was just five years old, and as a result, her relatives shunned her and predicted that she would never marry. She struggled to complete her education as the nightmare continued. As a teen, she was forced to marry her own father, a polygamist with three other wives. She bore him four childrenwho have also been shunned by her family. Desperate, she ran away to live on the streets. Her life was grim, but not as grim as the future they predicted for her. But Priscilla is a survivor, not a victim. She dreams of building a sanctuary, school, and psychosocial centre in Zambia. She shares her story with strong language and imagery, to help the reader truly understand what she went through. She wants to do everything she can to get others to take the claims of children seriously. Ten percent of the proceeds from the sale of her story will go to benefit the work of PSHAF.

'Human wisdom is of little or no value', wrote Plato in his Apology. And yet the ancient Greeks, including Plato himself, more than any other people of antiquity were fascinated by the pursuit of the wisdom they called philosophia. That search for knowledge involved an extensive use of maxims and quotations, as we can see from those expressions of Homer prefaced by the phrase 'as people say'. Homer, the Seven Sages and the Pre-Socratic philosophers are still extensively quoted in all the major western languages. Yet for all their popularity, until now there has been no single resource to which interested readers might turn. This unique reference book offers one of the most comprehensive selections of Greek quotations ever committed to print. With its English text matched by the original Greek, the volume collects 7500 entries, ranging from the archaic period to late antiquity, and across philosophy, drama, poetry, history, science and medicine, each indexed with key words to enable fast sourcing. Together, these selections provide an incomparable insight into the glories of Greek civilization.

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squireathough he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, "Tom Jones" is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.