“Now here is a writer after my heart. Zachariah Rapola first captivates me with his simple and lucid yet rhythmic diction. And then he seasons his stories with the ancient wisdom of proverbs and other idiomatic expressions. He portrays generational and cultural contradictions with empathy and humor. He paints for us a fabulous world where the supernatural and the strange exist comfortably in the same context as objective reality. These very modern stories are therefore a conversation between the living and the fourth dimension - the world of the dead and the unborn. Rapola is a true fabulist whose stories go beyond the documentary realism of most of South African fiction to a hyper-realistic plane of African orature." -Zakes Mda

Zachariah Rapola takes the reader into a phantasmagoric world where streets are paved with human remains and men are apocalyptically condemned to death by the fire of their loins. And yet, despite recurrent nightmares, the world is also home to calligraphers who continue to record dreams that encompass the past, present, and future in a sort of Borgesian circularity. The absolute certainty that life begins in dream, that the world beyond is what lends ours a semblance of reality, that only the meditation of ancestors offers a link to the gods, has seldom been expressed with the depth of conviction one finds in this work.

For all its contemporary relevance, it has at its core a dialogue between the living and the ancestors that creates a powerful resonance between the bones of the dead and the echoes of their survivors.

Zachariah Rapola is an award winning freelance writer and filmmaker who was born and raised in Alexandra, Johannesburg. The National Arts Council of South Africa awarded him a fellowship to attend the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2000. In 2001 his widely acclaimed youth novel, Stanza on the Edge, was published. Zachariah’s short stories and poetry have been published in variety of magazines and anthologies including Tribute Magazine, The Boston Review, and Discovering Home, the Caine Prize anthology published by Jacana in 2003. He has also written for a BBC/SABC comedy series and is currently developing a television series based on the novel Stanza on the Edge.