Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005

J. M. Coetzee

Random House, 2008 - Literary Criticism - 304 pages

'Coetzee the critic is every bit as good as Coetzee the novelist.' - Irish TimesFollowing on from STRANGER SHORES which contained J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 19F99, INNER WORKINGS, gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005.Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siecle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature's greatest writers.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 from 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.

About the author

J.M. Coetzee's full name is John Michael Coetzee. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, Coetzee is a writer and critic who uses the political situation in his homeland as a backdrop for many of his novels. Coetzee published his first work of fiction, Dusklands, in 1974. Another book, Boyhood, loosely chronicles an unhappy time in Coetzee's childhood when his family moved from Cape Town to the more remote and unenlightened city of Worcester. Other Coetzee novels are In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee's critical works include White Writing and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Coetzee is a two-time recipient of the Booker Prize and in 2003, he won the Nobel Literature Award.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
• Author: J. M. Coetzee
• Publisher: Random House, 2008
• ISBN: 1741666201, 9781741666205
• Length: 304 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / General