Looking for Trouble

Looking for Trouble

Colleen Higgs

A collection of short stories set in Yeoville from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

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R200.00

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DATE

2012

GENRE

Short stories
i

PAGES

96

ISBN

978-1-920397-42-5

Looking for Trouble

The stories capture with a dark humour the lives of young people trying to make a go of things, given the constraints of the country and the volatile period. Most of the stories have been published in literary magazines or in collections of stories including a collection published in Uganda. A slightly earlier version of the title story was published in a collection of stories by South African women edited by Maggie Davey, Dinaane, Telegraph Books, London.

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Colleen Higgs

As well as being a writer, Colleen Higgs is also a publisher, she started the ground-breaking independent southern African women’s press, Modjaji Books in 2007. She lives in Cape Town with her daughter and a cat. Looking for Trouble is her first collection of short stories. She also has two collections of poetry Lava Lamp Poems (2011) and Halfborn Woman (2004) all published by Hands-On Books.

She was recognised for her work in publishing by the Mail and Guardian, and was featured in their Book of Women 2011 in the Arts & Culture category.

Colleen Higgs's author page
Praise

These wry, subtle stories are deceptively simple, completely compelling. Brave, evocative writing that takes you back to the intense milieu of 80s Yeoville, and to all the bittersweet sexual questing of youth.
Henrietta Rose-Innes (Author of Shark’s Egg, Homing, Nineveh, and Caine Prize Winner)

“Looking for Trouble is one the most surprising books that I have read in a long time. A greatly sophisticated balance of simplicity and confidence emanates from each short story, as well as out of the collection as a whole… The success of this collection lies in the fact that it is simultaneously specific and transcendental; it moves beyond the historical specificity of a defined moment and confronts situations which are still of political importance.”

Christell Stander, Rapport

These stories awakened in me a sense of nostalgia, not only for Yeoville in the early nineties, but for being young, love’s fool and sexually reckless. At some point, experience forces us to lose our illusions and come of age, damaged by love but wiser. This spot-on collection captures that arc of life and, as I turned the last page, I felt we had lived well, if imperfectly.
Rachel Zadok (Author of Gem Squash Tokoloshe)

Looking for Trouble is a book that will make you late for work. Like an unexpected fist in the stomach. Words that will stay with you long after you turned the last page.
Melinda Ferguson (Author of Smacked and Hooked)

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