Friday, September 28, 2012

Books by Hagen Engler

Life's A Beach

by Hagen Engler



"At home people are running around screaming in Peruvian with suitcases they haven't closed properly, so there are clothes on the floor everywhere – like everyone's in standard eight watching porn at some guy's house and his mom's just got home. Big trouble. I take the three essentials: surfboard, passport and sunglasses, and run up the nearest hill to watch the apocalypse..."

Hagen Engler shows off his PE-ness in all its surf-starved glory. Share the mild psychoses and minor outrages of a Friendly Citizen who's survived tidal waves, twenty-firsts and Nude Girls gigs, and was once almost in an orange juice ad. Gasp! Marvel! Smirk! Chart a bizarre ocean fixation – from the Plettenberg Bay shallows to the North Shore of Hawaii, from the Rink Street Kwikspar to his ex-girlfriend's house in Blairgowrie...

Essential reading for anyone who's about to go to the bathroom.


Buy Life's A Beach!


Water Features

by Hagen Engler

"Large grey '72 kombi, seven surfboards on the roof, demanding my presence inside it, hollering, "How much do the tangerines cost? Quanto custa istu tangerinas?" And its bearded driver decoding the subtext of "Let's hit it, ek se," while the chemist lady gives me the gaff on the Larium side-effects. "Some people  have very vivid dreams..."

So begins a twisted, water-fuelled surf trip through Mozambique, Elvis worship, rave culture, the Transkei and the politics of Glad Eye. We're all 90% water, walking water features, which explains the popularity of everything from porn fetishes to Port Elizabeth's Pipe parking lot. The gender sweat differential, though, continues to baffle.

Buy Water Features


Magnum Chic

by Hagen Engler

"Was Magnum Chic truly the wave of the future? Would women find men wearing Millennium Moustaches irresistible? Are the tan safari suit and the nickname Higgy Baby due for a return to colloquial popularity? All of these questions had to be answered before I could truly make any sincere claim to fashion clairvoyance."

Join a search for meaning in South African life as Hagen Engler grows a dodgy moustache, visits Springbok, imagines his lovers are cement mixers and eats chicken. Magnum Chic is an collection of columns and articles chronicling the surreal months straddling the millennium. Entire cities are offended, mountains are climbed, sex is had and what emerges is an album of hilarious prose snapshots – digestible chunks of South Africana.

Buy Magnum Chic!


Greener Grass

by Hagen Engler

"But that fateful morning, Joe never got to perform his forward-leaning roach flick, because Destiny had been out raving and she was walking home through Clampett Park. 'Aah, please don't put that out,' she said. She was Layla, and she was the Rave Queen of PE."

Hagen Engler's first novel weaves together the lives of a group of goofballs into a hazy, impressionistic narrative as they search for life, love, a proper graft and a spot to stay in the New SA. They find that while the grass may be greener on the other side, it's cheaper at home. Soon to become motion picture...






Buttons For Gaia

by Hagen Engler

As a chaperone in the Cape Town movie industry, Wax Wilson can organise you anything. But when the pagan high priestess he's fallen for is abducted from a wedding at the Llandudno Lifesaving Club, things hit a wobbly. Then the German film crew he's looking after demands mandrax and a part-time porn queen starts making googly eyes at him. Pretty soon he's consorting with gangsters, getting stabbed one-time in the shoulder, and being kidnapped by a satanic sex cult Next thing, seven people are dead, and it looks like Wax killed them. As things get more and more hectic, Wax finds himself on a mission of dark vengeance in magical, mysterious Berlin...

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