Stranger shores : literary essays, 1986-1999

Description

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. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Zbigniew Herbert. Coetzee goes on to discuss eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Defoe and Turgenev, the German modernists such as Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, and the giants of late-twentieth-century literature, among them Brodsky, Gordimer, Rushdie, and Lessing. One: What Is a Classic?”: A Lecture Two: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Three: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Four: Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession Five: Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven Six: Cees Nooteboom, Novelist and Traveler Seven: William Gass’s Rilke Eight: Translating Kafka Nine: Robert Musil’s Diaries Ten: Josef Skvorecky Eleven: Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years Twelve: The Essays of Joseph Brodsky Thirteen: J.L. Borges, Collected Fictions Fourteen: A.S. Byatt Fifteen: Caryl Phillips Sixteen: Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh Seventeen: Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks Eighteen: Amos Oz Nineteen: Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish Twenty: The Poems of Thomas Pringle Twenty-one: Daphne Rooke Twenty-two: Gordimer and Turgenev Twenty-three: The Autobiography of Doris Lessing Twenty-four: The Memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach Twenty-five: South African Liberals: Alan Paton, Helen Suzman Twenty-six: Noel Mostert and the Eastern Cape Frontier