Elizabeth Costello

Description

Continuing Text's re-release of J.M. Coetzee's revered works with stylish new covers, Elizabeth Costello is a modern classic by the great the great Nobel Prize winner accompanied by introduction from one of Australia's foremost writing critics and Coetzee experts. Introduction by Melinda Harvey Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished Australian author in her mid-sixties celebrated for a novel she wrote decades earlier. In a series of eight 'lessons'-the transcripts of lectures and speeches-she examines such subjects as animal rights, evil and the afterlife. Published in 2003, Elizabeth Costello was the first book J. M. Coetzee published in his new home of Australia. With its blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction, its rigorous interrogation of weighty ideas and moments of bleak comedy, the novel issued a new and complex challenge to Coetzee's readers.

J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide. Melinda Harvey is a lecturer in literary studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She has published widely as a book critic for over a decade and is a judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

'An intimacy born from urgency crackles through each of [Coetzee's] books, as if one is not reading a text but being plugged into a brand new form of current-reinvented each time to carry a new and urgent form of narrative information.' * John Freeman * 'Coetzee is the most radical shapeshifter alive.' * Australian * 'Freed from literary convention, Mr Coetzee writes not to provide answers, but to ask great questions.' * Economist *