Books by J. M. Coetzee
Born: 02/09/1940J. M. Coetzee Biography & Notes
John Maxwell Coetzee (pronounced "coot-SEE-uh") is a South African author. On 2 October 2003, it was announced that he was to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the fourth African writer to be so honoured. The prize was awarded in Stockholm on 10 December.
He was born on 9 February 1940, in Cape Town, as John Michael Coetzee (he later changed his middle name), and his formative years were spent between that city and the Western Cape town of Worcester. He studied at the University of Cape Town, where he took degrees in mathematics and English.
In the early 1960s he relocated to London, England, where he worked for a time as a computer programmer; his experiences there were later chronicled in Youth (2002). He then moved on to postgraduate studies in literature in the USA at the University of Texas, following which he taught English and literature at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) until 1983.
In 1984 he returned to South Africa to a professorship in English Literature at the University of Cape Town. Upon retirement in 2002, he relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English department of the University of Adelaide.
He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize on two occasions: for The Life and Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999; because of a desire to avoid the associated publicity, however, he did not appear to collect his prizes. In addition to his novels, he has also published critical works and translations.
He was born on 9 February 1940, in Cape Town, as John Michael Coetzee (he later changed his middle name), and his formative years were spent between that city and the Western Cape town of Worcester. He studied at the University of Cape Town, where he took degrees in mathematics and English.
In the early 1960s he relocated to London, England, where he worked for a time as a computer programmer; his experiences there were later chronicled in Youth (2002). He then moved on to postgraduate studies in literature in the USA at the University of Texas, following which he taught English and literature at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) until 1983.
In 1984 he returned to South Africa to a professorship in English Literature at the University of Cape Town. Upon retirement in 2002, he relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English department of the University of Adelaide.
He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize on two occasions: for The Life and Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999; because of a desire to avoid the associated publicity, however, he did not appear to collect his prizes. In addition to his novels, he has also published critical works and translations.
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African Compass New Writing from Southern Africa, 2005 by J. M. Coetzee ( 2005) |
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African Road New Writing from Southern Africa, 2006 by J. M. Coetzee, Pen (Organization) ( 2006) |
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Age of Iron by J. M. Coetzee ( 1998)
In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, 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 fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep. Brilliantly crafted and resonant with metaphor, Age of Iron is "a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone." (The New York Times Book Review)
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Boyhood Scenes from Provincial Life by J. M. Coetzee ( 1998)
Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he despised, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life-the brilliant and well-behaved student at school, the princely despot at home, always terrified of losing his mother's love. His first encounters with literature, the awakenings of sexual desire, and a growing awareness of apartheid left him with baffling questions; and only in his love of the high veld ("farms are places of freedom, of life") could he find a sense of belonging. Bold and telling, this masterly evocation of a young boy's life is the book Coetzee's many admirers have been waiting for, but never could have expected.
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Brighton Rock by Graham Greene ( 2004)
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 affection and falls in love with him. When Pinkie learns that a wife cannot be forced to testify against her husband in criminal cases, he marries Rose despite his feelings of distaste for her. All the while, however, Pinkie is being pursued by Ida, a prostitute who is obsessed with bringing him to justice. As Greene commented in his autobiography, "The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans--doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime. They have something of a fallen angel about them, a morality which once belonged to another place." This view suggests that Greene's preoccupation with religious themes, which became explicit in his later novels, began with this relatively early work. This was also the book that made Greene's reputation as a major literary figure.
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The Confusion of Young Torless by Robert Musil ( 2001) |
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Contra La Censura by J. M. Coetzee ( 2007) |
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Contra La Censura/ Against Offense by J. M. Coetzee ( 2008) |
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Costas Extranas by J. M. Coetzee ( 2005) |
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Dance of the Freaky Green Gold by J. M. Coetzee ( 2009) |
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Dangling Man by Saul Bellow ( 2006)
Saul Bellow's first published novel portrays the thoughts and discomforts of Joseph, a young man in Chicago who quits his job in expectation of being drafted into the army during World War II. A series of bureaucratic snafus holds up his induction, however, and he finds himself with nothing to do for nearly a year. DANGLING MAN, the journal of Joseph's fresh and empty days, is full of insights into nearly every aspect of his world as he waits for the day when it all will end. DANGLING MAN appeared in 1944, when Bellow was still in his 20s.
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Desgracia/ Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee ( 2009) |
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Diario De Un Mal Ano/ Diary of a Bab Year by J. M. Coetzee ( 2007) |
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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee ( 2008)
Nobel Prize Winner J.M. Coetzee uses a formal device to explore the intersection between the essay and novel form. Each page of DIARY OF A BAD YEAR begins with a scrap of essay, is followed by a the perspective of C., an aging author who clearly acts as a stand-in for Coetzee himself and who has written the essays, and concludes with the perspective of the young and attractive Anya, a neighbor who has become C.'s typist. The situation begins to become unstable as Anya's businessman boyfriend initiates a scheme to defraud C. of his money. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2008.
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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee ( 2008)
Fulfilling a publisher assignment to share his opinion on the state of the world, aging writer Señor C pens a scathing indictment of western leaders, education, and other topics, an endeavor that is marked by his budding relationship with a new assistant. Reprint.
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Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee ( 2000)
Set between Cape Town and a remote farm in the Eastern Cape, this spare, unflinching novel of the modern South Africa traces the relationship between a farmer and his daughter. Reprint.
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Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee ( 2008)
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 is attacked and disfigured--he is able to reconcile himself to his stunted life by caring for animals and, finally, feeling a kind of kinship with them. DISGRACE won the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.
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Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews by J. M. Coetzee ( 1992)
An examination of J. M. Coetzee and his work in the form of questions and answers from David Atwell.
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Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee ( 1985)
Two stories deal with an investigation into psychological warfare in Vietnam and an eighteenth-century conflict between Dutch settlers in southern Africa and the native Hottentots.
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Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee ( 2003)
Elizabeth Costello is a humane, moral, and uncompromising creation.
The subject of J.M. Coetzee’s latest work of fiction is an Australian writer of international renown -- fêted, studied and honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world -- a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer-in-residence on a cruise liner during which she encounters a fellow guest lecturer, an African poet also employed to divert the passengers. Then there is a disquieting appearance at a writers’ conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly among the audience. She has made her life’s work the study of other people, yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations. J.M. Coetzee’s latest work of fiction offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind. |
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En Medio de Ninguna Parte/ In the Heart of the Country by J. M. Coetzee ( 2003) |
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En medio de ninguna parte by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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Esperando a Los Barbaros/ Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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Fifty-One Years by J. M. Coetzee, David Goldblatt, Chris Killip, Michael Godby, Spain) Museu D'Art Contemporani (Barcelona, Axa Gallery ( 2002) |
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Foe by J. M. Coetzee ( 1988)
In this brilliant reshaping of Defoe's classic tale starring Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee explores the relationships between speech and silence, master and slave, story and storyteller, and sanity and madness.
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Food The Vital Stuff by J. M. Coetzee, Graham Swift, John Lanchester ( 1995)
Edited by William S. Burroughs, this edition of Granta features selections on the joys (or perils) of food by writers ancient and contemporary, including Dante, Kafka, William Cowper, John Lanchester, Graham Swift, and Cornell Woolrich.
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From the Heart of the Country by J. M. Coetzee ( 1977) |
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Giving Offense Essays on Censorship by J. M. Coetzee ( 1996)
In "Giving Offense," South African writer J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of a writer who has lived and worked under its shadow.
Widely acclaimed for his many novels, Coetzee is also a brilliant literary critic and essayist. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. Subscribing neither to the myth of the writer as a moral giant nor to that of the writer as persecuted innocent, Coetzee 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 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with 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. Finally, Coetzee delves into the early history of apartheid and criticizes the blankness of contemporary political science in its efforts to address the deeper motives behind apartheid. |
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Hombre Lento / Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee ( 2007) |
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Hombre lento/ Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee ( 2005) |
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In the Heart of the Country by J. M. Coetzee ( 1982)
A young woman living on a remote South African farm describes her loneliness and bitter anger.
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Infancia / Boyhood by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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Infancia/ Boyhood by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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Inner Workings Literary Essays, 2000-2005 by J. M. Coetzee ( 2008)
A new collection of essays and literary criticism from the respected Nobel Prize-winning author of
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Juventud/ Youth by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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La Edad De Hierro by J. M. Coetzee ( 2002) |
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A Land Apart A Contemporary South African Reader by ( 1987)
Stories, poetry, and selections from diaries and autobiographies by native writers depict the current conditions in South Africa.
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A Land Apart by J. M. Coetzee, Andre Brink ( 1987)
Stories, poetry, and selections from diaries and autobiographies by native writers depict the current conditions in South Africa.
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Landscape With Rowers Poetry from the Netherlands by J. M. Coetzee ( 2005) |
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Landscape With Rowers Poetry from the Netherlands by ( 2003) |
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The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee ( 2001)
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.
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El Maestro De Petersburgo by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004) |
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The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee ( 1995)
The acclaimed author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K enters the world and mind of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this book is at once a compelling mystery and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination.
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Mecanismos internos/ Inner Workings Ensayos 2000-2005/ Literary Essays 2000-2005 by J. M. Coetzee ( 2009) |
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The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 2003 Lecture and Speech of Acceptance Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Delivered in Stockholm in December 2003 by J. M. Coetzee ( 2004)
In his acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, the renowned author shares a provocative short story, "He and the Man," in which he features Robinson Crusoe, following his return from his long island exile, as he reflects on the themes of death, spectacle, writing, allegory, solitude, and sociability while contemplating the person who writes of and for him.
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Platero y yo/ Platero and I by Juan Ramon Jimenez ( 2007)
In this series of autobiographical prose poems, Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez playfully and lovingly paints an evocative picture of early-20th century life in rural Andalucia. Through his conversations and adventures with his donkey Platero, Jimenez shares with readers details of his young life in the village of Moguer, but with this early publication, Jimenez also asserts the strength and character of the poetic voice he would develop over the next 44 years of his career. As the Nobel committee stated when awarding Jimenez the prize in 1956, "His later style, decisive, formally ascetic, and dominated by white, emerges in the poetic prose of his delicate PLATERO Y YO." Resonating with the work of Cervantes, this is a classic of modern Spanish literature.
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Schande by J. M. Coetzee ( 2002) |
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Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee ( 2006)
Rendered dependent on others after losing his leg in a bicycle accident, sixty-year-old photographer Paul Rayment finds himself falling in love with a down-to-earth Croatian nurse and encouraged by a mysterious writer to take an activist role in his own life. By the author of Elizabeth Costello. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
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Stranger Shores Literary Essays, 1986-1999 by J. M. Coetzee ( 2002)
An extraordinary anthology of literary essays by the Booker Prize-winning author of In the Heart of the Country presents twenty-six pieces on books and writing, including "What is a Classic?" and studies of Daniel Defoe, Ivan Turgenev, Kafka, Joseph Brodsky, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and other notable authors. Reprint.
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Summertime by J. M. Coetzee ( 2009)
With SUMMERTIME, Nobel Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee finishes the fictionalized memoir trilogy he began with BOYHOOD and YOUTH. An ingenious, self-deprecating, and brilliantly crafted novel, SUMMERTIME imagines an English biographer writing a book about the late novelist, John Coetzee. Focusing on Coetzee's formative years as a writer in the 1970s, the biographer interviews those closest to Coetzee--his dearest cousin; a Brazilian dancer; a woman with whom he had an affair; etc.--and an image emerges of a strident willful would-be poet, who, defeated by the world, has had to return to the family that views his literary desires as frivolous. SUMMERTIME, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, is complexly fashioned, but despite the conceptual conceit, it becomes a deeply personal and revealing portrait of an earnest artist trying to find his way both with his writing and in the world.
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Tierras de poniente/ Dusklands by J. M. Coetzee ( 2009) |
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Vida Y Epoca De Michael K. / Life And Times of Michael K. by J. M. Coetzee ( 2006) |
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Vida y Epoca de Michael K/ Time and Life of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee ( 2007) |
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Las Vidas De Los Animales by J. M. Coetzee ( 2002)
Discusses animal rights through essays in the voice of a fictitious Australian novelist who looks at cruelty to animals, and especially eating meat, as a horrific crime.
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The Vivisector by Patrick White ( 2009) |
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Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee ( 2010) |
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Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee ( 1982)
A magistrate in a country village protests the army's treatment of members of the barbarian tribes taken prisoner during a civil war and finds himself arrested as a traitor.
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White Writing On the Culture of Letters in South Africa by J. M. Coetzee ( 1988)
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.
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Youth by J. M. Coetzee ( 2003)
Hoping to escape his South African home, dysfunctional family, and what he believes to be an impending revolution, a young man becomes disappointed with his monotonous new life in London and begins a dark pilgrimage set against the events of the 1960s. Reprint.
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