The modern classic from double Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee - soon to be a major film starring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp 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 with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

A pianist falls grandly, helplessly in love in this elegant new novella from the twice-Booker Prize winner The Pole tells the story of Witold Walczykiewicz, a vigorous, white-haired pianist, who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert. Although Beatriz, who is married, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband's summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though only on her terms. As the power struggle between them intensifies -- Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Witold, trying to force into life his dream of love? Evocative of Joyce's 'The Dead,' The Pole is a haunting work, evoking the 'inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion' (El País) typical of Coetzee's finest novels. Published together with five exceptional stories, this new work from one of our greatest writers is a must for all literary connoisseurs.

J.M. Coetzee's screenplay versions of In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians are original and as yet unproduced cinematic adaptations of his novels. Apart from a few early lyric experiments, Coetzee's literary career has almost exclusively been dedicated to prose forms such as the novel, the memoir and the essay, and it is mainly for his accomplishments in novelistic fiction that he has achieved world-wide recognition. For readers familiar with Coetzee's writing career spanning more than 40 years, the screenplays, published for the first time in this volume, are thus an unusual and unexpected addition to the oeuvre. They show his versatility as a writer able to cross over into the medium of script writing and film, and doing so in a technically proficient and highly accomplished manner. Academic Herman Wittenberg has written an introduction to this collection, examining the difference in treatment between the screenplays and the novels, as well as Coetzee's relationship with cinema and film-making. This work is the only one to be produced in 2014 by J. M. Coetzee and will be celebrated at a conference in Adelaide, Australia, to be held in December, focusing on Coetzee's life work.

In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. Life and Times of Michael K goes to the centre of human experience - the need for an interior, spiritual life, for some connections to the world in which we live, and for purity of vision. 'This is a truly astonishing novel... I finished Life & Times of Michael K in a state of elation, for all the misery and suffering it contains. I cannot recommend it highly enough' Evening Standard

A pianist falls grandly, helplessly in love in this elegant new novella from the twice-Booker Prize winner.

The Pole tells the story of Witold Walczykiewicz, a vigorous, white-haired pianist who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert.

Although Beatriz, who is married, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband's summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though only on her terms.

As the power struggle between them intensifies -- Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Witold, trying to force into life his dream of love?

After years teaching Romantic poetry at the University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but refusing to yield to pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to daughter Lucy’s isolated smallholding.

For a time, his daughter’s influence and the natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.

Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee tells the remarkable story of a nation gripped in brutal apartheid in his Sunday Express Book of the Year award-winner Age of Iron. In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant's son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep. In Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee brings his searing insight and masterful control of language to bear on one of the darkest episodes of our times. 'Quite simply a magnificent and unforgettable work' Daily Telegraph 'A superbly realized novel whose truth cuts to the bone' The New York Times 'A remarkable work by a brilliant writer' Wall Street Journal South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel, Foe, an exquisite reinvention of the story of Robinson Crusoe is also available in Penguin paperback.

Exacting yet maddeningly unpredictable, J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, “extravagantly white-haired� Polish pianist who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his Barcelona concert. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold, she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into the world of the journeyman performer. As he sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband’s summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, though, it seems, only on her terms. The power struggle between them intensifies—Is it Beatriz who limits their passion by controlling her emotions? Or is it Wittold, trying to force into life his dream of love? Evocative of Joyce’s “The Dead,� The Pole is a haunting work, evoking the “inexhaustible palette of sensations, from blind love to compassion� (El País) typical of Coetzee’s finest novels.

African compass – New writing from southern Africa 2005 is the first title in a three–year series of the US $10 000 HSBC/SA PEN Literary award. The award is targeted at young writers who are citizens of any country in the SADC (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe). The chosen genre for the series is a short story and this volume contains a selection of the best from 373 entries. The upper age limit of writers was 40, and their work had to be original, previously unpublished and written in English. The selection process maintained author anonymity; initial readers, members of the editorial board and award judge, Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee, did not know the identity of authors throughout the process. When Antonio, apprentice to Michelangelo, asked how he might emulate the master he was told: 'Draw, Antonio Draw!' We say to young people of our region: 'Write Africa Write!' There must be future 'masters' of the written word in southern Africa and this series is intended to search them out and encourage them in the early days of their careers. Some of the stories still bore the marks of the school classroom, others were obviously by seasoned hands. Some were sophisticated in style, drawing confidently on the extravagances of contemporary postcolonial fiction, others were still fully faithful to the example of Somerset Maugham.

Winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction

In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority. At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target. In this landmark book, Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play. As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation.

For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.

J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

Expecting to be inducted into the army, Joseph has given up his job and carefully prepared for his departure to the battlefront. When a series of mix-ups delays his induction, he finds himself facing a year of idleness. Bellowas first novel documents Josephas psychological reaction to his inactivity while war rages around him and his uneasy insights into the nature of freedom and choice.

Nobel Laureate and two-time Booker prize-winning author of Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel DeFoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe in Foe. In an act of breathtaking imagination, J.M Coetzee radically reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe. In the early eighteenth century, Susan Barton finds herself adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave, Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover. At last they are rescued by a passing ship, but only she and Friday survive the journey back to London. Determined to have her story told, she pursues the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe in the hope that he will relate truthfully her memories to the world. But with Cruso dead, Friday incapable of speech and Foe himself intent on reshaping her narrative, Barton struggles to maintain her grip on the past, only to fall victim to the seduction of storytelling itself. Treacherous, elegant and unexpectedly moving, Foe remains one of the most exquisitely composed of this pre-eminent author's works. 'A small miracle of a book. . . of marvellous intricacy and overwhelming power' Washington Post 'A superb novel' The New York Times South African author J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice for his novels Disgrace and The Life and Times of Michael K. His novel set during the South African apartheid, Age of Iron, winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award is also available in Penguin paperback.

A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold, who is determined to avenge a death.

The luminous new novel from 'one of the best writers of our time', twice winner of the Booker Prize 'The Death of Jesus is full of truth' -- David Sexton, Book of the Week, Evening Standard In The Childhood of Jesus, Simòn found a boy, David, and they began life in a new land, together with a woman named Inès. In The Schooldays of Jesus, the small family searched for a home in which David could thrive. In The Death of Jesus, David, now a tall ten-year-old, is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to go and live with Julio and the children in his care, Simòn and Inès are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness. With almost unbearable poignancy J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions. **A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK TO WATCH OUT FOR IN 2020**

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Observer and Daily Telegraph 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, 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 mesmerising 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.

Simón and David - a tall ten-year-old - are in a new land, together with a woman named Inés. The small family have found a home in which David can thrive.

But David is spotted by Julio Fabricante, the director of a local orphanage, playing football with his friends. He shows unusual talent. When David announces that he wants to live with Julio and the children in his care, Simón and Inés are stunned. David is leaving them, and they can only love him and bear witness.

The Death of Jesus is the completion of an incomparable trilogy in which J. M. Coetzee explores the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.

Here and Now is a collection of letters between Paul Auster and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, two of the greatest writers of our time. 'Uniquely insightful.' Independent 'Extraordinary.' Times Literary Supplement Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other's books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, 'God willing, strike sparks off each other'. Here and Now is the result of that proposal: an epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, eroticism, marriage, friendship, and love.

A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, now a major motion picture starring Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp 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. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he finds himself jolted into sympathy with their victims-until their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war finally pushes him into a quixotic act of rebellion, and thus into imprisonment as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee's third novel, which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, is an allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that elevate their own survival above justice and decency.

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced.

Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie—whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”—obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point.

Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

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.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on a period in the seventies when, the biographer senses, Coetzee was 'finding his feet as a writer'. He embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to Coetzee - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. Thus emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual, regarded as an outsider within the family. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, and rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language, he has begun to make friends and he has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him.

But he'll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, 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. Yet it's here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what adults are capable of.

The Schooldays of Jesus is a mesmerising tale about growing up, and about the choices we are forced to make in our lives.

Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.
J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship.
From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, "Giving Offense" focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.
"The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."--Kenneth Baker, "San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"
"Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."--"Kirkus Reviews"
"These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and Rene; Girard.Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."--Bill Marx, "Hungry Mind Review"
"An extraordinary collection of essays."--Martha Bayles, "New York Times Book Review"
"A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."--Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"