First published in 1983 and winner of the Booker Prize. Set in a turbulent South Africa, a young gardener decides to take his mother away from the violence towards a new life in the abandoned countryside, but finds that war follows wherever he goes. From the author of DUSKLANDS and IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY....

The great Russian novelist Dostoevsky, obsessed with discovering whether his stepson's sudden death was murder or suicide, finds himself drawn into the violent revolutionary subculture of 1869 Russia, in a work of fiction that is both mystery and psychological portrait. Reprint....

Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman’s life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling....

These deluxe editions are packaged with French flaps, acid-free paper, and rough front.

"A real literary event."--The New York Times Book Review

"A story of profound beauty, clarity and eloquence, which even at its most melodramatic holds to a biblical nobility."--Chicago Tribune Book World

Other Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
My Antonia by Willa Cather
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
White Noise by Don DeLillo...

Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize

A brilliant new work of fiction from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year

A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a rundown cottage in the Cape Town suburbs with his widowed father-a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. Never having met the man himself, the biographer interviews five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair, his cousin Margot, and a Brazilian dancer whose daughter took English lessons with him. These accounts add up to an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it hard to make meaningful connections with the people around him.

Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J.M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to come to grips with what it means to care for another human being. Incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny, Summertime is a compelling work by one of today's most esteemed writers.

...

The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world.

Costello's son, a physics professor, admires her literary achievements, but dreads his mother's lecturing on animal rights at the college where he teaches. His colleagues resist her argument that human reason is overrated and that the inability to reason does not diminish the value of life; his wife denounces his mother's vegetarianism as a form of moral superiority.

At the dinner that follows her first lecture, the guests confront Costello with a range of sympathetic and skeptical reactions to issues of animal rights, touching on broad philosophical, anthropological, and religious perspectives. Painfully for her son, Elizabeth Costello seems offensive and flaky, but--dare he admit it?--strangely on target.

Here the internationally renowned writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction--Coetzee brings all these elements into play.

As in the story of Elizabeth Costello, the Tanner Lecture is followed by responses treating the reader to a variety of perspectives, delivered by leading thinkers in different fields. Coetzee's text is accompanied by an introduction by political philosopher Amy Gutmann and responsive essays by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, primatologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. Together the lecture-fable and the essays explore the palpable social consequences of uncompromising moral conflict and confrontation....

Disgrace--set in post--apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.

At fifty--two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David's attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells "truths [that] cut to the bone" (The New York Time Book Review).

A finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards
Coetzee is the only writer to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice...

J. M. Coetzee, Premi Nobel de Literatura 2003, és, a parer de molts, l'escriptor més important dels nostres temps. Poques vegades havia parlat de si mateix fins que el 1997 va sorprendre tothom amb Infantesa, el primer lliurament d'una ficció autobiogràfica que van seguir Joventut i Temps d'estiu.Per primera vegada, presentem en un sol volum la trilogia d'aquestes ficcions autobiogràfiques, les Escenes de la vida a províncies, revisades per l'autor, que posen en relleu la relació inquietant entre la realitat de la vida i la ficció dels llibres i conformen un magnífic retrat de l'artista. L'obra comença en una petita vila de la Sud-àfrica dels anys quaranta: un noi intenta trobar el seu lloc al món sota la tutela d'un pare distant i una mare que l'estima incondicionalment. Ja de jove, estudia matemàtiques a Ciutat del Cap, escriu poesia i viatja a Europa amb pretensions artístiques. La realitat, però, l'obliga a tocar de peus a terra i a treballar com a programador informàtic. La seva vida d'adult la coneixem gràcies al seu biògraf, un tal Mr. Vincent, que reconstrueix la vida del novel·lista en què s'ha convertit J. M. Coetzee passats els anys.«J. M. Coetzee pertany a la fosca nissaga dels innovadors literaris, capaç -com va escriure Sebald- d'elevar allò prosaic (la vida) fins al nivell de la poesia. El 1997 va aparèixer Infantesa, i cinc anys més tard Joventut, un doble intent, diria que bell, perfecte, d'elaborar una memòria ficcional o, potser, una falsa, tot i que enlluernadora, autobiografi a en la qual no queda clar el que és real i el que és fictici. En ple domini de tots els seus recursos tècnics, Coetzee se sent atret pel risc extrem i d'aquest estat de gràcia de l'artista madur sorgeix Temps d'estiu (2009), el tercer lliurament de la trilogia novel·lada de la seva memòria.» Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia ...