J.M. Coetzee Books In Order

Jesus Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. The Childhood of Jesus (2013)
  2. The Schooldays of Jesus (2016)
  3. The Death of Jesus (2019)

Scenes from Provincial Life Books In Publication Order

  1. Boyhood (1997)
  2. Youth (2002)
  3. Summertime (2009)
  4. Scenes from Provincial Life (2011)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. In the Heart of the Country (1976)
  2. The Lives of Animals (1977)
  3. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
  4. Life and Times of Michael K (1983)
  5. Foe (1986)
  6. Age Of Iron (1990)
  7. The Master of Petersburg (1994)
  8. Disgrace (1999)
  9. Elizabeth Costello (2001)
  10. Slow Man (2005)
  11. Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. White Writing (1988)
  2. Doubling the Point (1992)
  3. Giving Offense (1996)
  4. Stranger Shores (2001)
  5. The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 (2003)
  6. Inner Workings (2007)
  7. Here and Now (With: Paul Auster) (2012)
  8. The Good Story (2015)
  9. Late Essays (2017)
  10. J.M. Coetzee – Photographs from Boyhood (2020)

Jesus Trilogy Book Covers

Scenes from Provincial Life Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

J.M. Coetzee Books Overview

Boyhood

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.

Youth

The narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s, has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, and saving money, he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, wherever that may be, he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. Arriving at last in London, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer, from which random, loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration, he stops writing. An awkward colonial, a constitutional outsider, he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting. Set against the background of the 1960s Sharpeville, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself. J. M. Coetzee explores a young man’s struggle to find his way in the world with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

Summertime

Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him. Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today’s most esteemed writers.

In the Heart of the Country

A novel set in colonial South Africa, where a lonely sheepfarmer makes a bid for private salvation in the arms of a black concubine, while his daughter dreams of and executes a bloody revenge. From the author of DUSKLANDS and WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS.

The Lives of Animals

‘Coetzee stirs our imaginations by confronting us with an articulate, intelligent, aging, and increasingly alienated novelist who cannot help but be exasperated with her fellow human beings, many of them academics, who are unnecessarily cruel to animals, and apparently but not admittedly committed to cruelty. The story urges us to reconceive our devotion to reason as a universal value.’ From the introduction by Amy Gutmann The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello’s son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother’s lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother’s vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but dare he admit it? strangely on target. Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello’s own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee’s text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

Waiting for the Barbarians

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid free paper, and rough front. ‘A real literary event.’ The New York Times Book Review’A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility.’ Chicago Tribune Book WorldOther Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:The Grapes of Wrath by John SteinbeckHeart of Darkness by Joseph ConradLove in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia MarquezThe Adventures of Augie March by Saul BellowThe Age of Innocence by Edith WhartonA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James JoyceSwann’s Way by Marcel ProustMy Antonia by Willa CatherOn the Road by Jack KerouacWhite Noise by Don DeLillo

Life and Times of Michael K

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his 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. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre 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.

Foe

When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the middle of the Atlantic she enters the world of two men. One is a mute negro called Friday; the other is Robinson Cruso. The Island is a society already at work. Its rules are simple: survival, industry and order. Cruso is master and Friday is the slave. Susan watches the creation of a barren world an architecture of stone terraces above bleak and empty beaches and waits to be rescued. Back in London, with Friday in tow as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of the island than in the story if Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject. Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the mystery of Cruso’s island, is the silent Friday.

Age Of Iron

An old woman is dying of cancer in Cape Town. A classics professor, Mrs Curren has always been opposed to the brutality of apartheid, 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; discovers the bullet riddled body of her servant’s son, and a teenage black activist hiding in her house, who is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion is a homeless man, an alcoholic who appears on her doorstep. J M Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

The Master of Petersburg

In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson’s landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel’s life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson’s ghost and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.

Disgrace

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 clas*ses 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.

Elizabeth Costello

In 1982, J. M. Coetzee dazzled the literary world with the now classic Waiting for the Barbarians. Five novels and two Booker prizes later, Coetzee is a writer of international stature and a novelist whose publication of a new work is heralded as a literary event. Now, in his first work of fiction since The New York Times bestselling Disgrace, he has crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. From an award acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, Coetzee draws the reader inexorably toward its astonishing conclusion. Vividly imagined and masterfully wrought in his unerring prose, Elizabeth Costello is, on its surface, the story of a woman’s life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling that only a writer of Coetzee’s caliber could accomplish.

Slow Man

When photographer Paul Rayment loses his leg in a bicycle accident, his solitary life is irrevocably changed whether he likes it or not. Stubbornly refusing a prosthesis, Paul returns to his bachelor’s apartment in Adelaide, Australia, uncomfortable with his new dependency on others. He is given to bouts of hopelessness and resignation as he looks back on his sixty years of life, but his spirits are lifted when he finds himself falling in love with Marijana, his practical, down to earth Croatian nurse who is struggling to raise her family in a foreign land. As Paul contemplates how to win her heart, he is visited by the mysterious writer Elizabeth Costello, who challenges Paul to take an active role in his own life. In this new book, Coetzee offers a profound meditation on what makes us human, on what it means to grow older and reflect on how we have lived our lives. Like all great works of literature, Slow Man is a novel that asks questions but rarely provides answers; it is a portrait of a man in search of truth. Paul Rayment s accident changes his perspective on life, and as a result, he begins to address the kinds of universal concerns that define us all: What does it mean to do good? What in our lives is ultimately meaningful? Is it more important for one to feel loved or cared for? How do we define the place that we call ‘home’? In his clear and uncompromising voice, Coetzee struggles with these issues, and the result is a deeply moving story about love and mortality that dazzles the reader on every page.

Diary of a Bad Year

A new work of fiction by the Nobel Prize winning author of Disgrace In this brilliant new work of fiction, J. M. Coetzee once again breaks new literary ground with a book that is, in the words of its main character, a response to the present in which I find myself. Diary of a Bad Year takes on the world of politics a new topic for Coetzee and explores the role of the writer in our times with an extraordinary moral compass. At the center of the book is Se or C, an aging author who has been asked to write his thoughts on the state of the world by his German publisher. These thoughts, called Strong Opinions, address a wide range of subjects and include a scathing indictment of Bush, Cheney, and Blair, as well as a witheringly honest examination of everything from Machiavelli and the current state of the university to music, literature, and intelligent design, offering unexpected perceptions and insightful arguments along the way. Meanwhile, someone new enters the writer’s life: Anya, the beautiful young woman whom he hires to type his manuscript. The relationship that develops between Se or C and Anya has a profound effect on both of them. It also changes the course of Anya s relationship with Alan, the successful, swaggering man whom she lives with and who has designs on Se or C s bank account. Through these characters, Coetzee creates an ingenious literary game that will enthrall readers and surprise them with its emotional power. Bold, funny, and sad, as well as intellectually clever and satisfying, Diary of a Bad Year is a journey into the mind and heart of one of the world s most acclaimed and accomplished writers.

White Writing

Since it first appeared in 1988, JM Coetzee’s first volume of criticism, White Writing, has emerged as an indispensable reference in the study of South African literature. In the seven essays comprising the collection, he reads a range of texts, in various genres, which represent the endeavours of white writers to come to terms with the South African landscape and their tenuous place within it. Their projects, Coetzee argues, are vexed by the various ways in which the South African context resists the writers schema of representation, and their efforts at its domestication. South Africa simply will not conform to their desire for a new Eden or to their demand for a rustic idyll, and it is in the forge of their estrangement that much early white South African literature was created. The seven essays concern a wide range of works written in both English and Afrikaans. Among others, the nineteenth century travel writing of William Burchell, which compares the landscapes of England and South Africa, always to the latter s detriment, is discussed in relation to subsequent engagements by Thomas Pringle, WEG Louw, WC Scully and Roy Campbell. This leads on to a study of the plaasroman and its precursors, culminating in a chapter concerning the novels of the prolific and popular, CM van den Heever.

Doubling the Point

Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his ‘vision goes to the nerve centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance’. ‘Doubling the Point‘ takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee’s longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography. Centrally concerned with the form and content of fiction, ‘Doubling the Point‘ provides insight into the significance of certain writers particularly modernists such as Kafka, Musil, and Beckett, the value of intellectual movements from structuralism and structural linguistics on through deconstruction, and the issues of political involvement and responsibility not only for Coetzee’s own work, but for fiction writing in general. In interviews prefacing each section of the book, Coetzee reflects on the essays to follow and relates them to his life and work. In these interviews editor David Attwell prompts from Coetzee answers of depth and interest. The result is the story of a fiction writer’s intellectual development, and of an intellectual’s literary development. It is the story of how one writer has moved through the scholarly and political trends of the last 30 years, carefully as*sessing their applications and limitations, and through this experience forged for himself a unique and powerful literary voice informed in equal parts by life and learning.

Giving Offense

Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He 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 Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits 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 po*rnography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.’The most impressive feature of Coetzee’s essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise.’ Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review’Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship’s evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead…
he pursues censorship’s deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings.’ Kirkus Reviews’These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises.’ Publishers Weekly’Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and Ren ; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor.’ Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review’An extraordinary collection of essays.’ Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review’A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition.’ Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Stranger Shores

The only author ever to win the Booker Prize twice, J. M. Coetzee is, without question, one of the world’s greatest novelists. Now his many admirers will have the pleasure of reading his significant body of literary criticism. This volume gathers together for the first time in book form, twenty six pieces on books and writing, all but one previously published. Stranger Shores opens with ‘What is a Classic?’ in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question ‘What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?’ by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert. His subjects range from the great eighteenth and nineteenth century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and Doris Lessing.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003

In his acceptance speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, J. M. Coetzee delivered an intriguing and enigmatic short story, ?He and His Man.? The story features Robinson Crusoe, long after his return from the island, reflecting on death and spectacle, writing and allegory, solitude and sociability, as he searches his mind for some true understanding of the ?man? who writes of and for him. In the spare and powerful prose for which Coetzee is renowned, The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 is a provocative testament to the uncompromising vision of one of the world?s most profound writers.

Inner Workings

A collection of essays on literature by one of the world’s finest writers. Following on from Stranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee s essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai lived through the Austro Hungarian fin de si cle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth century German literature s greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin the Arcades Project, Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan, in his wrestlings with the German language. There is an essay on Graham Greene s Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented by Walt Whitman through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and V.S. Naipaul.

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