J.M. Coetzee
Life & Times of Roger F
In a surprise move, John Maxwell Coetzee became the first Nobel Laureate to give up writing and join the ATP tour. He's playing men's and mixed doubles in this year's Open. Toni Morrison had considered it back in the mid-1980s, but wrote Beloved instead.
Clever Coetzee's Latest Novel: Reader Assembly Required
Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
DIARY OF A BAD YEAR
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 231 pages, $24.95
Remember Roland Barthes’ distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts? If the answer is no—and especially if the answer is a pointed “no thank you”—then I suspect that J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year is not for you. I enjoyed it, and I admired it, but I was aware as I was reading it that this kind of novel is an acquired taste only a small minority will be interested in acquiring. read more »
Coetzee’s Master Class in Literary Criticism
INNER WORKINGS: LITERARY ESSAYS 2000-2005
By J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 304 pages, $25.95
Each of the 21 essays included in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 is named for the author whose works it examines, making the collection’s table of contents read like a syllabus. In the first half of the course, J.M. Coetzee lectures on European literature of the first half of the 20th century, in translation from Italian, German, Hungarian and Polish. It’s an honor roll of anomie: the Swiss writer Robert Walser, for example, whose works went largely neglected during his lifetime, the last years of which he spent institutionalized; or the Austrian Robert Musil, whose The Man Without Qualities (1930) chronicled the breakdown of Enlightenment liberalism that prefigured the rise of fascism in Europe. read more »
And They're at the Gate: Didion, Coetzee, Gaitskill in the Running
And They’re at the Gate: Didion, Coetzee, Gaitskill in the Running
A Jolly Geezer, Updike Is Back
Narrative Free-Styling From New Nobel Laureate
