I am fixated by this detail of the bread and beans because it strikes me that Coetzee’s prose might itself be described as “bread and beans” writing: short, declarative sentences, with a fairly simple vocabulary.
The fight against Google’s digital library continues, and this time the effort has support from big-name authors like Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Carey, and J.…
Nosy readers often delight in sleuthing out the parallels between an author’s work and their life, as if an identifiable autobiographical source might change the meaning behind the words. So…
Over at The Monthly, J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz elaborate on stringing a good yarn: What ties one to the real world is, finally, death. One can make up stories…
Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has received a lifetime’s worth of press, but over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wai Chee Dimock grasps its literary paralells; alternating between analysis and essay,…
“In every story of obsession there is only one character. I am writing about myself alone… for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say…