In 2008, a British clinical psychologist, Arabella Kurtz, invited Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee to participate in a public discussion about literature and psychoanalysis. The notoriously ...

Last December J.M. Coetzee, the South African-turned-Australian author, returned to Cape Town to give a reading. He began by thanking his former colleagues at the university where he had taught; he ...

I’ve long been intrigued by late style. The phrase comes from Theodor Adorno, who in 1937 defined it like this: “The maturity of the late works does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are ...

Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize–winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's ...

I don’t read J.M. Coetzee for pleasure. To be fair, I’m not sure anyone does. The 2003 Nobel laureate writes from his head more than his heart, framing novels that are philosophical and austere, books ...

Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee begins his latest novel with an epigraph from the second part of “Don Quixote,” published in 1615, 10 years after the first part. Coetzee does not bother to translate ...

Fortunately “The Tempest” has no sixth act. What could Shakespeare have made out of Prospero after he broke his wand and renounced his magic? Just another pensioner with nothing to do but hang around, ...

Again with the animals! You might recall that when last we saw fiction from South African-born writer J.M. Coetzee, it was his Booker Prize-winning novel “Disgrace.” Its protagonist, communications ...

Men and their desires. Do we really need more on the subject? It is ground that has been plowed so often, by Roth, Updike, and others who came of age during the sexual revolution and its aftermath.

How do you evaluate a novelist whose works are littered with scathing self-assessments? The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee has articulated so many harsh criticisms of himself and his fiction within his ...

In J.M. Coetzee’s 2013 novel, “The Childhood of Jesus,” a man and a boy arrive by boat in a strange, Spanish-speaking land of virtuous vegetarians. Something has washed away the memories of the ...