Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 - Hardcover

Coetzee, J. M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670038652 ISBN 13: 9780670038657

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2007

Synopsis

A new collection of essays and literary criticism from the respected Nobel Prize-winning author of Stranger Shores is comprised of twenty recently written pieces that examine the work of such twentieth-century writers as Samuel Beckett, Günter Grass, and Gabriel García Márquez.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africas highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britains prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

From Booklist

In his second volume of literary essays, following Stranger Shores (2001), Nobel laureate Coetzee conducts deep readings primarily of major twentieth-century European and American writers. Cosmopolitan in range and erudite in texture, Coetzee's biocritical explications delve into the art, times, and humanity of, among others, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Paul Celan, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, and W. G. Sebald. As a South African expat, Coetzee is attuned to literature under pressure as writers write in lands other than home, contending with language gaps and facing a world in violent upheaval. In his American essays, Coetzee brings an unusual perspective to Walt Whitman's eroticism, Faulkner's vision of the South, Philip Roth's Plot against America, and Arthur Miller's screenplay for The Misfits. In each case, Coetzee tells a story as much as he interprets the work, riding in the slipstream of his subject's life and writings as he parses matters personal, technical, aesthetic, moral, and political with both subtlety and vigor. Coetzee's profound fascination with the clarity and mystery of literature reaffirms its significance. Seaman, Donna

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0670038652
• ISBN 13: 9780670038657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320