Böcker av J. M. Coetzee

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016Observer and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year 2016David is the small boy who is always asking questions. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.

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. Here the internationally renowned 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.

Wittold is a vigorous, white-haired pianist and is infatuated with the stylish (and married) Beatriz after she helps organise his Barcelona concert. He sends her letters, extends countless invitations to travel, and even visits her husband's summer home in Mallorca. Their unlikely relationship blossoms, as does their intense power struggle.

An astonishing new masterpiece from the Nobel and twice Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace and SummertimeAfter crossing oceans, a man and a boy - both strangers to each other - arrive in a new land.

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.

This text presents an analysis of censorship from the perspective of a writer who has lived and worked under its shadow. Seeking to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring, Coetzee focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship.

Late Essays gathers together Coetzee's literary essays since 2006. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane.

Interviewees describe an awkward man still living with his father, a man who insists on performing dull manual labour. His family regard him with suspicion and he is dogged by rumours: that he crossed the authorities in America, that he writes poetry.

A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist. 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?

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.

A collection of the author's literary essays from 2000 to 2005. It discusses writers such as Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai who lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siecle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud.

What, he asks, is the origin of the state and the nature of the relationship between citizen and state? How should the citizen of a modern democracy react to the state's willingness to set aside moral considerations and civil liberties in its war on terror, a war that includes the use of torture?

'A great novel by one of the finest authors writing in the English language today' The TimesAfter years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student.