A broad range of stunning essays from Australia’s resident Nobel laureate.

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, Hölderlin, 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, on Flaubert’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.