Flat/White

Overview

The experiences upon first moving to New York City that South Africa–raised writer Ted Botha records here are so outlandish as to be unbelievable yet all the more astonishing for being true. Soon after having arrived in the city, Botha was able to lie his way into a job at Time Out New York before moving on to work for Vanity Fair and other magazines. And when he found a $10,000 apartment in a small, dilapidated Harlem building a mere two blocks from where other Manhattan apartments were selling for more than $1 million, he seemed to have it made. But what appeared to be a fantastic opportunity quickly devolved into a world of chaos, lies, conspiracies, suspicion, drug dealers, police raids, and death threats, much of it underpinned by a beast Botha thought he’d left behind in Africa: race. In what is equal parts a memoir, a comedy, a tragedy, and a travelogue, Botha describes his attempts to reconcile his life in the New World with the one he left behind in Africa—not to mention survive the anarchy rampant in the old building—while introducing a cast of characters that readers will not soon forget.

Author Biography

Ted Botha is an editor for Reuters and a writer whose work has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Oustide, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Apartheid in my Rucksack, The Girl with the Crooked Nose, Mongo: Adventures in Trash, and the novel The Animal Lover, as well as the coauthor of The Expat Confessions. He lives in New York City.