Once Removed - by David Mann (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 Thomas Pringle Award for the short story "Meaningful Contributions."

In this singular, brilliant collection, art critic David Mann delivers thirteen interlinked stories inspired by the South African art world.

From high-end galleries to crumbling museums, art fairs and archives to one-room studios, Mann's storiesconsider the experience of having one's life changed, in ways both profound and banal, through novel encounters with art and performance. But they also zero in on the homes, private lives, and emotional interiorities of the creatives who inhabit these sacred places.

Delving into the lives of the artists, critics, and art lovers that characterize the country's contemporary art and performance space, Once Removed reveals the precarity and importance of creative work in post-apartheid South Africa and beyond.

Review Quotes

"David Mann's debut collection of stories about art and artists is elegant, plaintive, wry and urgent. It is an affectionate deliberation of the importance of art -- and writing about it -- in our current time of disquiet." -- Sean O'Toole, editor, curator and art critic

"The stories comprising Once Removed are consistently excellent: they are elegantly composed and provoking. Each depicts and evokes places, scenes, and interactions in subtle yet vivid ways. I have not been this compelled by a collection of short fiction in a considerable time." -- Prof. Michael Titlestad, Department of English, Wits.

"Stories about art, artists, writers -- gently tussling with where they belong, and with ideas about ideas and what can seem like the travails of creative life. I enjoy the way Mann expresses human frailty and social nuance. There is also a tender humor running through the stories like a silvery thread." -- Laurice Taitz, writer and editor

"The stories are richly varied... Moral piety is crushed, the lies built into the artworld exposed, the struggle of youth to carve out its path in an uncertain market, the book's emotional core. As one of Mann's characters remarks, 'It is my job to gather the ... words, images, infographics, and other rogue malleable things'. It is the last strung bead that is most telling. If anything, Mann's keenly attuned and biting prose is rogue." -- Ashraf Jamal, art critic and cultural theorist

"Mann has the rare ability to be both cynical and kind, revealing an empathetic understanding and keen observance of human nature that is reflected in clear prose and unaffected dialogue." -- Steve Kretzmann, journalist and theatre critic

"The stories explore how one's life can be changed, in ways both profound and banal, by interaction with art and performance. And he does so with a wonderful elegance and an admirable economy of words." -- Rodney Ghobril, The Mail & Guardian

"David Mann's short story collection Once Removed is inventive, and in tune with what it means to be a young artist in a contemporary struggle for literary self-identity" -- Kris Van der Bijl, The Johannesburg Review of Books

"This collection... is good fiction, superb even. It will take you to places and scenes in Cape Town, and to Johannesburg. In essence Once Removed is about South African art and performance, told in a creative and engaging manner that will not bore you, but make you look on the South African contemporary art scene differently." -- Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

About the Author

DAVID MANN is an award-winning writer, editor, and art critic from South Africa. His reviews and essays on art, as well as his short fiction, have appeared in journals and publications including Springerin in Germany, Portside Review in Australia, and Contemporary Lynx in the UK. He currently works as the writer for The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an interdisciplinary arts incubator in Johannesburg. Once Removed is his debut collection of short fiction, and was awarded the Thomas Pringle Short Story Prize in 2024 for the short story "Meaningful Contributions."