Table of Contents

One: What Is a Classic?": A Lecture
Two: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Three: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
Four: Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession
Five: Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven
Six: Cees Nooteboom, Novelist and Traveler
Seven: William Gass's Rilke
Eight: Translating Kafka
Nine: Robert Musil's Diaries
Ten: Josef Skvorecky
Eleven: Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years
Twelve: The Essays of Joseph Brodsky
Thirteen: J.L. Borges, Collected Fictions
Fourteen: A.S. Byatt
Fifteen: Caryl Phillips
Sixteen: Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
Seventeen: Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks
Eighteen: Amos Oz
Nineteen: Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish
Twenty: The Poems of Thomas Pringle
Twenty-one: Daphne Rooke
Twenty-two: Gordimer and Turgenev
Twenty-three: The Autobiography of Doris Lessing
Twenty-four: The Memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach
Twenty-five: South African Liberals: Alan Paton, Helen Suzman
Twenty-six: Noel Mostert and the Eastern Cape Frontier
Notes

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

Erudite, insightful, impressive in scope and subject matter. (San Francisco Chronicle)