On October 15th at 6:30pm EDT, Ivan Vladislavić joins Community Bookstore to present his new novel The Distance, in conversation with Peter Godwin. This event will take place on zoom, you can register here.

In his youth in 1970s suburban Pretoria, Joe falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He diligently scrapbooks newspaper clippings of his his hero, recording the showman’s words and taking in his inimitable brand of resistance. Forty years later, digging out his yellowed archive of Ali clippings and comic books, Joe sets out to write a memoir of his childhood. Calling upon his brother Branko for help, their two voices interweave to unearth a shared past. Reconstructing a world of bioscopes, Formica tabletops, Ovaltine, and drop-offs in their father’s Ford Zephyr, conjuring the textures of childhood, The Distance is a collision of memories, patching the gulf between past and present. Meaning arises in the gaps between fact and imagination, and words themselves become markers of the past and the turbulent present. In this formally inventive, fragmented novel, Vladislavić evokes the beauty, and the strangeness, of remembering and forgetting, and explores what it means to be at odds with one’s surroundings.

Ivan Vladislavić was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg, where he works as a writer and editor. His books include the novels The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative, and a compendium of short stories titled Flashback Hotel. In 2006, he published Portrait with Keys, a sequence of documentary texts on Johannesburg. He has edited books on architecture and art, and sometimes works with artists and photographers. TJ/Double Negative, a joint project with photographer David Goldblatt, received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book. His work has also won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and, most recently, a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction.

Peter Godwin is an award-winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he was a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and a founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC television’s premier foreign affairs program. Godwin is the author of six nonfiction books, including Mukiwa which was an international bestseller and winner of the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstone’s Non-Fiction Award. His book The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, was selected by the New Yorker as a best book of the year.

click here for the Zoom registration link