J.M. Coetzee: Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

By MARGIE THOMSON

One of the world's greatest novelists exercises his brain on the work of others in this collection of literary criticism that spans from Daniel Defoe and Ivan Turgenev through German modernists Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka, to late-20th-century giants such as Salman Rushdie, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.

Coetzee's forensic explorations of meaning - of both work and life - are deft and erudite, as he weaves back and forward between multiple sources and his own learned insightfulness, sometimes (as in the case of Kafka) turning accepted scholarship on its head.

Secker & Warburg
$59.95