In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life-affirming novel illuminates the human ...
In South Africa after apartheid, a middle-aged professor of Romantic poetry sees his career crumble as the world turns more to technology than to literature. After a series of ever more degrading misadventures, including a charge of sexual harassment, he ends up on his daughter's farm. There, after further disgraces--his daughter is raped and he ...
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. ...
'A small miracle of a book ...of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' - "The Washington Post", Book World. Coetzee reinvents the story of "Robinson Crusoe", directing our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself.
An old woman is dying of cancer in Cape Town. A classics professor, Mrs Curren has always been opposed to the brutality of apartheid, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since ...
In Graham Greene's brilliant and harrowing psychological portrait of a sadistic young gangster, published in 1938, Pinkie, the teenaged head of a Brighton mob, becomes implicated in a murder early in the story. The only possible witness to the crime is Rose, a naive young waitress in a teashop who mistakes Pinkie's nervous inquiries for a sign of ...
These angry lectures about the ethics of the human-animal relationship were given at Princeton, ostensibly by a novelist named Elizabeth Costello; this volume also includes commentary on Coetzee's ideas by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Windy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts.
A memoir of growing up in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, written by the Nobel Prize-winning author of THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K. and DISGRACE. Coetzee examines his early impressions of his family, his unhappy years at school, and his slowly developing awareness of the political strife that hangs over his country.
The writer Elizabeth Costello was a character in Coetzee's 1999 novel THE LIVES OF ANIMALS. In this novel, the eponymous Elizabeth, now aging, gives lectures, writes about other people's books, and participates in a variety of literary and philosophical conversations--all of which not only reveal her as a human being but mirror Coetzee's own ...
An eminent, seventy-two-year-old Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled "Strong Opinions". It is a chance to air some urgent concerns. He writes short essays on the origins of the state, on Machiavelli, on anarchism, on al Qaida, on intelligent design, on music. What, he asks, is the origin of the state and the nature of the ...
In J.M. Coetzee's eighth novel, Paul Rayment is a photographer whose life seems to be taking several turns for the worse: at 60 years old, he's alone in the world, and he has just lost his leg in an accident. Unexpectedly, he finds himself falling in love with his maternal and comforting nurse, a Croatian woman named Marijana. And then another ...
From the acclaimed South African writer, this autobiographical account explores Coetzee's youth as a boy who longs only to escape his homeland. When he finally does get away, however, and is living in London as a lonely computer programmer--rather than the poet he hoped to be--he confronts his disillusion by giving up writing. Coetzee's account of ...
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met ...
Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?," Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" He explores the answer by way of T. S. ...
Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace. As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's ...
The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, from a father whose failures haunt him, and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in ...
Though the Netherlands has been the site of vigorous literary activity since at least the Beweging van Vijftig (Movement of the Fifties) poets, the status of Dutch as a "minor" language spoken by only twenty-two million people has kept its rich poetry more or less a secret. This volume - featuring J. M. Coetzee's finely wrought English ...
J. M. Coetzee is, without question, one of the world's greatest novelists. This volume gathers together for the first time in book form twenty-nine pieces on books, writing, photography and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. STRANGER SHORES opens with "What is a Classic?" in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question-"What does ...
Following on from "Stranger Shores", which contained J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999, "Inner Workings" gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several - Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai - lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siecle and felt the ...
Described as "one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century" in this book's Introduction by J.M. Coetzee, Samuel Beckett is known for his works of poetry, short fiction, and criticism--now collected in Volume IV of this series.
When his stepson dies in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Dostoevsky abandons his life in Germany to investigate the cause of death--suicide or murder. At the same time, while he seeks to discover whether his stepson loved him or loathed him, he becomes embroiled in the ideas of the radical political activists who may have taken his son. In this brilliant ...
How do we cope with the public and private disaster? Jasmina Tesanovic on being bombed in Belgrade -- "The Diary of a Political Idiot"; Ian Jack on good behavior aboard the Titanic; Joy Williams on the necessary death of her dog Hawk; Edward Said on the shame of his body; James Buchan inside Saddam's Iraq. Plus: Edmund White, and the debut of a ...
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