Your next reads: Eerie magical realism and a sex-positive guide

Flying Cows and Other Traumas by Philisiwe Twijnstra

I made the mistake of reading the first story in Philisiwe Twijnstra’s Flying Cows and Other Traumas late at night. I won’t say why. The reason is a spoiler, and you deserve to walk into it unaccompanied, at an hour when the house makes its own noises. I will say only that I put the book down properly frightened and did not pick it up again until the sun was fully up.

That is a recommendation.

In daylight I went back and found something other than fear waiting: range, and an enormous wingspan. There are golden fishes. There are grannies wielding guns. There are cannibal girls, in a story that leans hard into horror.

What holds it together is one move, worked with vision: the ordinary is going about its business, and then something other gets into it. This is magical realism that knows exactly where it is standing.

South Africa does not have nearly as much speculative writing as it should. We have a literature that has been asked, for good historical reason, to be documentary: to testify, to record, to explain us to ourselves. What we have had less of is permission to invent.

Twijnstra owns that permission and the result is both an act of imagination and an argument for imagination. Published by Jacana, who took her on through their From Pitch to Publication programme, it is exactly the risk local publishing should be taking more often.

What I loved most is who stands at the centre of these stories. Black women, black queer women, hold the frame throughout, not as the subject of someone else’s speculation, but as the ones the strange things happen to and, more importantly, the ones who come out the other side having claimed power.

The collection is a celebration of local talent. A few stories arrive before they are ready, premises that deserved another draft. In a book this inventive the unevenness is conspicuous, because the strongest pieces show exactly what the weaker ones could have been. 

But unevenness in a debut this ambitious is a small complaint, and an ordinary one. What is not ordinary is the scope: bold, capacious, willing to be daring and funny and terrifying in the same paragraph. Twijnstra is a playwright by training, and you can feel the theatre in her, the appetite for spectacle, holding the audience tight.

She is definitely a writer to watch.

Flying Cows and Other Traumas by Philisiwe Twijnstra was published in April 2026. Retail price: About R240.

Sexponential by Nicki Brivik

I got off a flight from Johannesburg to go to Nicki Brivik’s book launch in Cape Town, and what a launch it was: sex toys on sale along the back wall, a bitterly cold winter night outside, and an audience so committed to looking sexy that Brivik opened by thanking them for not wearing their puffer jackets. I spent the rest of the evening sitting on mine, attempting to cover its full circumference with my behind.

SEXponential is for people in long-term relationships who want to deepen their connection and invest in a more mindful, communicative and pleasure-filled love life. Brivik’s central move is to treat being sexual as a spectrum rather than a fixed setting.

Desire, attraction and behaviour fluctuate; they shift and evolve across a life. Desire gaps open up in couples, and they usually open outside the bedroom first, when connection elsewhere thins out; what happens in bed thins out with it.

The book is unfailingly practical. Brivik is a sex and intimacy coach, and she writes like one, structuring the material around anonymised case studies from her practice and giving you language you can actually use.

The concept I have found most useful is brakes and accelerators. Accelerators stimulate desire: they make you feel aroused, interested, available. Brakes are the turn-offs, the things that shut it down. Crucially, they are different for every person. I have been road-testing this vocabulary on my partner.

On a recent weekend away I was able to tell him that having him row a boat while I lay back and read a book was an enormous accelerator. He received this as an allegation of exploited labour. The same weekend supplied the definitive brake. We were on a farm, accelerating very nicely over cheese and conversation, when he found a tick on the dog. I had not previously understood the sheer braking power available to a tick.

Brivik is also doing something braver than the practical framing suggests. She goes directly at the cultural, historical and religious baggage that makes talking about sex so difficult in South Africa, specifically the inherited silences that most books in this genre simply write around.

And she is firm about dismantling the myth that great sex should happen effortlessly, that needing to work at it is evidence something has gone wrong. Intimacy requires active investment. Her signature equation for couples looking to upscale their erotic connection: mindfulness, communication, creativity and collaboration. All of which are pivotal to paying attention.

What stayed with me is the argument running underneath all of it: that the somatic and the mental are not separate departments, and that pleasure is not something you clock into at bedtime. Brivik draws a line from how we experience the ordinary world – texture, taste, weather, a boat on a dam – to how we show up in bed. Sensuality is a practice you are either in or out of all day long.

Read it. Then go and find out what your accelerators are.

Sexponential by Nicki Brivik was published in July 2026. Retail price: About R320. DM