The sequel to the award-winning Writing Still, this new collection of stories paints an engaging - and sometimes challenging - picture of contemporary life and concerns in Zimbabwe. Like its predecessor, Writing Now combines well-established writers - Chinodya, Mupfudzi, Eppel, Chingono - with several new voices. Although the stories emerge from lives of economic hardship and privation, their tone is by no means uniformly. Zimbabwean writers continue to demonstrate that sharp humour and surreal fantasy can grow from the bleakest of roots.

Weaver Presss previous collections of short stories, Writing Now and Writing Still, were highly praised for the quality of their prose and the imagination of their writers. They confirmed, for one reviewer, the paradoxical truth that troubled societies somehow produce some of the most interesting writing available.

Laughing Now goes further, and demonstrates the enduring capacity of Zimbabweans to find humour in even the most difficult of circumstances. The stories embrace funerals, dancing competitions, family tensions, rampant inflation and endless queues for scarce goods. They take a wry...

In this fifth anthology of Zimbabwean short stories from Weaver Press fifteen writers respond to the topic of writing free, and offer their thoughts about how and why they wrote as they did. The stories reflect a wide variety of freedoms: from tyranny, from hunger, from abuse, from the shackles of tradition, and even from the traditional constraints of narrative convention. But there are cautionary tales, too. Political change may be liberating for the adults who suffered for it, but will their children share in the euphoria of new-found freedom? Will a departure from domestic poverty to the...

Writing Lives is the seventh of Weaver's anthologies of short stories following Writing Still, Writing Now, Laughing Now, Women Writing Zimbabwe, Mazambuko and Writing Free. As with the other anthologies, this vibrant collection reflects the lives and experiences of Zimbabweans as filtered through the lens of each author's perceptions. Writing Lives gives us stories that will make us laugh and bring tears to our eyes as it provides a focus on the past, the present and even the future.

This eighth anthology of twelve short stories from Weaver Press reveals again the range and variety, compassion and humour, irony and tragedy with which Zimbabwean writers observe the world around them. Several writers adopt a tongue-in-cheek approach to the subject: Naishe Nyamubaya takes us behind graphic newspaper headlines with a story of goblins, Jonathan Brakarsh turns the world inside out by constantly reversing our expectations, and Lawrence Hoba draws a situation both 'collateral and incompatible'. It is a characteristic of crime fiction to defy expectation, as Farai Mudzingwa,...