Stranger Shores
Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world’s greatest novelists and in Stranger Shores he turns his gaze on those who have influenced him. 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.
Contents
- What is a classic? : a lecture 1
- Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 17
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa 23
- Marcellus Emants, a posthumous confession 34
- Harry Mulisch, the discovery of heaven 39
- Cees Nooteboom, novelist and traveler 49
- William Gass’s Rilke 60
- Translating Kafka 74
- Robert Musil’s diaries 88
- Josef Skvorecky 104
- Dostoevsky : the miraculous years 114
- The essays of Joseph Brodsky 127
- J.L. Borges, collected fictions 139
- A.S. Byatt 151
- Caryl Phillips 160
- Salman Rushdie, the moor’s last sigh 169
- Aharon Appelfeld, the iron tracks 179
- Amos Oz 184
- Naguib Mahfouz, the harafish 191
- The poems of Thomas Pringle 203
- Daphne Rooke 208
- Gordimer and Turgenev 219
- The autobiography of Doris Lessing 232
- The memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach 249
- South African Liberals : Alan Paton, Helen Suzman 261
- Noël Mostert and the eastern Cape frontier 272
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