Publisher's Synopsis
A superb collection of essays from one of the world's finest living writers and the only author to win the Booker Prize twice.
For the many admirers of J.M. Coetzee, one of the world's greatest novelists, comes the pleasure of reading his significant body of literary criticism gathered together for the first time in one volume. This collection of twenty-six essays, all but one previously published, opens with What is a Classic? an exploration of what makes the works of writers such as T.S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert endure. His other 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.
Coetzee applies his critical genius 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.
