New Releases by J. M. Coetzee

David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old. David still asks lots of questions. One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave his parents to live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. J.M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions in this final book in the trilogy following "The Childhood of Jesus" and "The Schooldays of Jesus."

Scenes from Provincial Life brings together, in one volume, J.M. Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, Boyhood, Youth and Summertime It opens in a small town in the South Africa of the 1940s. We meet a young boy who, at home, is ill at ease with his father and stifled by his mother’s unconditional love. At school he passes every test that is set for him, but he remains wary of his fellow pupils. Later, as a student of mathematics in Cape Town he prepares to escape to Europe and turn himself into an artist. Once in London, however, the reality is dispiriting. Decades on, an English biographer researches a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. As he interviews important figures in Coetzee’s life, a portrait emerges of an awkward outsider who – even after death – remains dogged by rumours.

A coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring and argue that a destructive dynamicof belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.

"J.M. Coetzee's vision goes to the nerve center of being."—Nadine Gordimer The revolutionary first fiction by Nobel Prize Winner, J.M. Coetzee 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. 2024 is the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Dusklands

Crossing J.M. Coetzee's range of well-known writerly interests, including Beckett, with essays on Australian writers including Gerald Murnane, Patrick White and Les Murray. The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee's contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, H lderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. There are essays too on Tolstoy's great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, onFlaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary,and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto. J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.

From the Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee, the haunting sequel to The Childhood of Jesus, continuing the journey of David, Simon, and Ines. When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins. David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simon and Ines work, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it's here, too, that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of. In this mesmerizing allegorical tale, Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, of what it means to be a parent, the constant battle between intellect and emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.

"The Good Story" is an exchange between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with a training in literary studies. Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship? The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors have to be accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, they offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.

After crossing oceans, a man and a boy arrive in a new land. Here they are each assigned a name and an age, and held in a camp in the desert while they learn Spanish, the language of their new country. As Simon and David they make their way to the relocation centre in the city of Novilla, where officialdom treats them politely but not necessarily helpfully. Simon finds a job in a grain wharf. The work is unfamiliar and backbreaking, but he soon warms to his stevedore comrades, who during breaks conduct philosophical dialogues on the dignity of labour, and generally take him to their hearts. Now he must set about his task of locating the boy's mother. Though like everyone else who arrives in this new country he seems to be washed clean of all traces of memory, he is convinced he will know her when he sees her. And indeed, while walking with the boy in the countryside Simon catches sight of a woman he is certain is the mother, and persuades her to assume the role. David's new mother comes to realise that he is an exceptional child, a bright, dreamy boy with highly unusual ideas about the world. But the school authorities detect a rebellious streak in him and insist he be sent to a special school far away. His mother refuses to yield him up, and it is Simon who must drive the car as the trio flees across the mountains. The Childhood of Jesus is a profound, beautiful and continually surprising novel from a very great writer.

xiv, 288 pages : 24 cm

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy for the victims, and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison.

This brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Disgrace" and "Diary of a Bad Year" allows Coetzee to imagine his own life, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being.

A new collection of essays and literary criticism from the Nobel Prize winner. In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. As Derek Attridge observes in his introduction, reading Coetzee's nonfiction offers one the opportunity to see "how an author at the forefront of his profession engages with his peers, not as a critic from the outside, but as one who works with the same raw materials." In this collection of twenty recent pieces, Coetzee examines the work of some of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Insightful, challenging, yet accessible, these essays demonstrate Coetzee's sharp eye and unwavering critical acumen and will be of interest to his fans as well as to all readers of international literature.--From publisher description.

A masterful new novel from one of the greatest writers alive. Paul Rayment is on the threshold of a comfortable old age when a calamitous cycling accident results in the amputation of a leg. Humiliated, his body truncated, his life circumscribed, he turns away from his friends. He hires a nurse named Marijana, with whom he has a European childhood in common: hers in Croatia, his in France. Tactfully and efficiently she ministers to his needs. But his feelings for her, and for her handsome teenage son, are complicated by the sudden arrival on his doorstep of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who threatens to take over the direction of his life and the affairs of his heart. Unflinching in its vision of suffering and generous in its portrayal of the spirit of care, Slow Man is a masterful work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers.

Youth'S Narrator, A Student In 1950S South Africa, Has Long Been Plotting An Escape From His Native Country. Studying Mathematics, Reading Poetry, Saving Money, He Tries To Ensure That When He Arrives In The Real World 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 And Begins A Dark Pilgrimage In Which He Is Continually Tested And Continually Found Wanting. Set Against The Background Of The 1960S, Youth Is A Remarkable Portrait Of A Consciousness 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.