Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999, by J.M. Coetzee (used)

"The scale of Coetzee's reading makes most British criticism seem dully provincial' – Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph

This volume gathers together for the first time in book form twenty-nine pieces on books, writing, photography and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. Stranger Shores opens with ‘What is a Classic?' in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question - 'What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?'– by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach and Zbigniew Herbert.

His subjects range from the great eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth-century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.

Condition: worn but fair, cracked spine