Book cover for The Distance by Ivan Vladislavic

The Distance

2020 Released
210 Pages
4-5 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Paperback Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
ArchipelagoISBN 9781939810779

A boxing bildungsroman - a collage of memories, love, resistance, and the spectacle of Muhammed Ali in Apartheid South Africa. 

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

Ivan Vladislavic

Ivan Vladislavic is a fiction writer, essayist and editor whose books include The Near North, Double Negative and Portrait with Keys. He is Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

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