Staff Pick
An epistolary exchange of two literary luminaries, Here and Now collects three years of written correspondence between novelists J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster. Through a series of mostly brief, yet engaging, letters (often faxed!), the two authors offer, share, and challenge each other's thoughts, feelings, opinions, and insights on a range of subjects, including friendship, sports, politics, language, the banking crisis, names, books and reviews, film, travel, aging, morality, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both Coetzee and Auster come across as personable, charming, erudite, self-effacing, and often very funny. Their friendship is an obviously genuine one, with each holding the other (as well as their respective works) in esteem and admiration.
As it can be a fool's errand to ever attempt to tease out autobiographical traces from within a novel, the desire to "know" an author better is frequently a frustrating one. Letters, however, offer a glimpse of a writer's more personal side, one often unseen, veiled, or otherwise imperceptible in fiction alone. John Maxwell, whose works are often sparse and precise, seems far more expansive and affable than one would perhaps expect. Coetzee and Auster are both perceptive, curious, and seemingly genteel, and their exchanges never delve into pretentiousness or pomposity. Even if one were unfamiliar with the books of either author, Here and Now would likely still seem an interesting, stimulating exchange between two learned individuals with respect for the values and opinions of the other. Their friendship seems like an effortless one, and, thus, their correspondences feel intimate and unguarded. For fans of Auster and Coetzee (or simply good writing), Here and Now is a rewarding, intelligent effort — like being given the opportunity to sit in on the daily, urbane musings of two close friends with much on their minds. Recommended By Jeremy G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.
Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.
Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.
Review
"An outstanding achievment." —
Nadine Gordimer
"A major work of crystalline intensity." —Los Angeles Times
"So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified." —The New York Times Book Review
Review
Erudite, insightful, impressive in scope and subject matter. (
San Francisco Chronicle)
Review
"A small miracle of a book...of marvelous intricacy and overwhelming power." —
The Washington Post Book World
"Foe is a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination, and skill.... The writing is lucid and precise, the landscape depicted mythic yet specific." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Intense, clear and powerful. The promise, so brilliantly fulfilled in his later work, is clear in this earliest novel." —
Daily Telegraph
Review
Fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental. . .a telling portrait of the artist as a young man that illuminates the hidden source of his art." —
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Exceptional...a scorched tale of race, caste, shame, and—at times—hilarious bewilderment." —The New Yorker
"Tremendously readable and powerful...a masterfully told, spare and accessible memoir." —The Boston Globe
Review
"It is, quite simply, a magnificent and unforgettable work." —
The Daily Telegraph
"Coetzee is one of the greatest writers of our time.... Age of Iron is taut, ironic, grieving and, finally, astonishing." —Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable work by a brilliant writer." —The Wall Street Journal
Review
“Disgrace is not a hard or obscure book
—it is, among other things, compulsively readable
—but what it may well be is an authentically spiritual document, a lament for the soul of a disgraced century.”
—The New Yorker “A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland…. Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form.”—Time
“Mr. Coetzee, in prose lean yet simmering with feeling, has indeed achieved a lasting work: a novel as haunting and powerful as Albert Camus’s The Stranger.”— The Wall Street Journal
“A tough, sad, stunning novel.”—Baltimore Sun
Synopsis
- A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . It's a pleasure to be in their company.- --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking.
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, eroticism, 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 pleasure in each other's friendship on every page.
Synopsis
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
Synopsis
[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . Its a pleasure to be in their company.” Michael Dirda, The Washington Post 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, eroticism, 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 pleasure in each others friendship on every page.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
and#160;
The New York Trilogy is the series that made New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster a renowned writer of metafiction and genre-rebelling detective fiction.and#160;The New York Review of Books has called his work and#147;one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.and#8221; Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, these uniquely stylized detective novels include City of Glass in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. Heand#8217;s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case thatand#8217;s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.
This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.
Synopsis
With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians and The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself
In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.
Synopsis
A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves.
With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Paul Auster, the New York Times-bestselling author of The New York Trilogy presents a dazzling, picaresque novel set in the late 1920s the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone. Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt the Wonder Boy," is a Saint Louis orphan rescued from the streets by a mysterious Hungarian Jew, Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. Master Yehudi brings Walt into a Kansas circus troupe consisting of Mother Sioux and Aesop, a young black genius. The vaudeville act takes them across a vast and vibrant country, through mythic Americana where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob. Walt's rise to fame and fortune mirrors America's own coming of age, and his resilience, like that of the nation, is challenged over and over and over again.
Synopsis
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction,
The Music of Chance follows Jim Nashe who, after squandering an unexpected inheritance, picks up a young gambler named Jack Pozzi hoping to con two millionaires. But when their plans backfire, Jim and Jack are indentured by their elusive marks and are forced to build a meaningless wall with bricks gathered from ruins of an Irish castle. Time passes, their debts mount, and anger builds as the two struggle to dig themselves out of their Kafkaesque serfdom.
New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) brings us back into his strange, shape-shifting world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a powerful yet unpredictable force.
Synopsis
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)
Synopsis
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
Synopsis
[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . Its a pleasure to be in their company.” Michael Dirda, The Washington Post 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, eroticism, 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 pleasure in each others friendship on every page.
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 Africa's 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 Britain's 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.
Table of Contents
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
Notes