Non-Fiction Books

Essays discuss the white literature of South Africa, explain how white writings attempt to justify colonization, and look at the novels of van den Heever and Millin

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his "vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance". "Doubling the Point" takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography. Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, "Doubling the Point" provides insight into the significance of certain writers (particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett), the value of intellectual movements (from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction), and the issues of political involvement and responsibility - not only for Coetzee's own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell prompts from Coetzee answers of depth and interest. The result is the story of a fiction writer's intellectual development, and of an intellectual's literary development. It is the story of how one writer has moved through the scholarly and political trends of the last 30 years, carefully assessing their applications and limitations, and through this experience forged for himself a unique and powerful literary voice informed in equal parts by life and learning.

Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system. "The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."— Kirkus Reviews "These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."— Publishers Weekly "Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."—Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review "An extraordinary collection of essays."—Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review "A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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 it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?' - by way of TS Eliot, JS Bach and Zbigniew Herbert. His subjects range from eighteenth and nineteenth century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.

A beautiful collector's edition of J. M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize lecture In his acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, J. M. Coetzee delivered an intriguing and enigmatic short story, "He and His Man." The story features Robinson Crusoe, long after his return from the island, reflecting on death and spectacle, writing and allegory, solitude and sociability, as he searches his mind for some true understanding of the "man" who writes of and for him. In the spare and powerful prose for which Coetzee is renowned, The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 is a provocative testament to the uncompromising vision of one of the world's most profound writers.

A collection of essays on literature by one of the world’s finest writers. 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-siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature’s greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan, in his “wrestlings with the German language.” There is an essay on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented by Walt Whitman through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul.

“[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . It’s a pleasure to be in their company.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “An extended meditation on the processes of friendship, [ Here and Now ] has something substantive to offer.”— The New York Times Book Review After a meeting at an Australian literary festival brought them together in 2008, novelists Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee began exchanging letters on a regular basis with the hope they might “strike sparks off each other." Here and Now is the result: a three-year epistolary dialogue that touches on nearly every subject from sports to fatherhood, literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, death, marriage, friendship, and love. Their high-spirited and luminous correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and reveal their delight in each other’s friendship on every page.

A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-wining writer and a psychotherapist. The Good Story is an exchange between a great writer with a long-standing interest in human psychology and a distinguished psychotherapist who has long been passionate about literature. Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches are language and story. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist collaborates with the patient on the story of their life. Are they seeking an absolute truth or a fiction that will help the patient to overcome their distress? The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors several generations back have to be accommodated into the national story. They draw on the work of great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky as well as canonical writers on psychoanalysis such as Freud and Melanie Klein. Their discussion provides an illuminating insight into the stories we tell of our lives.

Stranger Shores , a collection of J.M. Coetzee’s essays from 1986 to 1999 was followed by Inner Workings , which contained those from 2000 to 2005. Late Essays gathers together Coetzee’s literary essays since 2006. The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio di Benedetto. J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.

Author J.M. Coetzee sold his house in Cape Town, unaware that he was leaving behind unique documents from his teenage years. In the attic of his former home, the new owners discovered a forgotten brown suitcase and a large cardboard box, containing a complete photographic archive of old prints and negatives from Coetzee’s childhood never seen before. The book also has an exclusive interview with John Coetzee about his boyhood and photo experiments.