Short takes on disjointed times: literary form and social thought in Graham K. Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid

This essay reviews Graham K. Riach's recently published monograph The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking With Form in South African Literature (2023) against the background of a growing preoccupation with temporality, in recent years, in South African writing and criticism. The mode of political formalism Riach espouses in this significant new contribution to the field of South African literature threads together aesthetic and social concerns to propose the post-apartheid short story as a critical vector for making sense of our disjunctive times. Through close readings of stories by Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, Phaswane Mpe and Henrietta Rose-Innes, Riach opens important new discursive terrain in our apprehension of the social in South Africa, while at the same time advancing our understanding of, and appreciation for the short fiction of these important writers.