In dialogue with the dead and living - Nelson Mandela, Mahmoud Darwish, Barack Obama - internationally distinguished South African artist and writer Breyten Breytenbach's new collection of essays traces the collisions between utopia and disaster, political traumas and the renewal of hope. Notes from the Middle World is a beautiful and heart-wrenching book. Against the conformity of power, Breytenbach takes readers on a journey through the 'Middle World,' an imagined space beyond borders and exile, toward an embracing vision of justice for the un-citizens post-modernity has dispossessed.