‘Well this looks interesting … is it literature?’ Phumlani Pikoli chats about his new book, The Fatuous State of Severity
More about the book!

Pan Macmillan interviewed Phumlani Pikoli about his new book, The Fatuous State of Severity.

Phumlani S Langa, in the City Press, described the stories as ‘crisp, experimental and beautifully weird’.

About the book:

The Fatuous State of Severity is a fresh collection of short stories and illustrations that explores themes surrounding the experiences of a generation of young, urban South Africans coping with the tensions of social media, language insecurities and relationships of various kinds.

Intense and provocative, this new edition of the book, which was first self-published in 2016, features six additional stories as well as an introductory essay on Pikoli’s publishing journey.

In the interview, the 30-year-old multimedia journalist, artist and author chats about the book’s cover, his writing process and what he’s working on next:

The cover is striking and compliments the theme of the book. What inspired the cover?

I freestyled the initial cover via its print using a journal where I lazily scribbled the titles and some meaningless, yet seemingly profound, rambling about life and death. So after the first edition, it’s dope to be able to get a lot of the artistic collaborators and myself onto the same page literally falling all over each other.

People tend to ‘judge a book by its cover’, how do you think people will relate to the cover?

I imagine them thinking: Well this looks interesting … is it literature?