In 1982, J. M. Coetzee dazzled the literary world with his novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Five novels and two Booker prizes later, Coetzee is a writer of international stature. Now, in his first work of fiction since the New York Times bestselling Disgrace, he has crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. Elizabeth Costello is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. From an award-acceptance speech at a New England liberal arts college to a lecture on evil in Amsterdam and a sexually charged reading by the poet Robert Duncan, Coetzee draws the reader inexorably toward its astonishing conclusion. Vividly imagined and masterfully wrought in unerring prose, Elizabeth Costello is, on its 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 that only a writer of Coetzee's caliber could accomplish. Book jacket. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Even more uncompromising than usual, this latest novel by Coetzee (his first since 1999's Booker Prize-winning Disgrace) blurs the bounds of fiction and nonfiction while furthering the author's exploration of urgent moral and aesthetic questions. Elizabeth Costello, a fictional aging Australian novelist who gained fame for a Ulysses-inspired novel in the 1960s, reveals the workings of her still-formidable mind in a series of formal addresses she either attends or delivers herself (an award acceptance speech, a lecture on a cruise ship, a graduation speech). This ingenious structure allows Coetzee to circle around his protagonist, revealing her preoccupations and contradictions her relationships with her son, John, an academic, and her sister, Blanche, a missionary in Africa; her deep, almost fanatical concern with animal rights; her conflicted views on reason and realism; her grapplings with the human problems of sex and spirituality. The specters of the Holocaust and colonialism, of Greek mythology and Christian morality, and of Franz Kafka and the absurd haunt the novel, as Coetzee deftly weaves the intense contemplation of abstractions with the everyday life of an all-too-human body and mind. The struggle for self-expression comes to a wrenching climax when Elizabeth faces a final reckoning and finds herself at a loss for words. This is a novel of weighty ideas, concerned with what it means to be human and with the difficult and seductive task of making meaning. It is a resounding achievement by Coetzee and one that will linger with the reader long after its reverberating conclusion.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Coetzee structures his latest novel around a series of lectures given by Elizabeth Costello, an eminent Australian novelist in the later years of her life, who is best known for her early feminist novel based on Joyce's Molly Bloom. The lectures are presented at awards ceremonies, as a guest speaker at an American university, and as part of the entertainment package aboard an Antarctic cruise ship. These philosophical inquiries cover topics ranging from realism to the African character to the nature of evil. In her longest and most passionate speech, Costello offers a spirited defense of animal rights, comparing the enslavement and slaughter of animals on factory farms to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis. These addresses and her prickly behavior between lectures infuriate audiences and alienate her long-suffering family. But Costello's rigid morality and probing intelligence finally illuminate the fundamental question of what it means to be human. An intense and challenging novel; highly recommended for all libraries.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Although it's billed as a novel masquerading as a biography, some readers may speculate that Coetzee's newest is a biography posing as a novel, or even lectures formed into fiction (six portions were previously published separately). The format is instantly intriguing. Elizabeth Costello is a near-elderly Australian novelist who remains best known for an early work in which she appropriates James Joyce's Ulysses character, Molly Bloom. Coetzee tackles problems of writing, literature, philosophy, and family through eight lessons, most of which center on a lengthy formal address. In Realism, Costello travels to Pennsylvania with her son to receive an award; Coetzee slyly enumerates conventions of realistic storytelling even as he guides Costello through interview, debate, and a lecture in which she declares, The word-mirror is broken, irreparably. In The Novel in Africa, Costello lectures on a cruise ship with an old acquaintance, Emmanuel Egudu, a Nigerian expatriate novelist. Egudu's talk takes center stage, even as Costello demands to know why there is no African novel worth speaking of. In later lessons, Costello speaks passionately about animal rights; hears her sister, a nun, deride the humanities; and gives a speech she is not sure she believes, claiming writers who explore evil may not survive uncontaminated. Coetzee may be exploding the genre, but Elizabeth Costello has real novelistic force. Our pleasure is watching this fascinating woman wrestle with intellectual issues as if they are life-and-death matters--and being convinced, in the end, that they are. KeirGraff. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

J. M. Coetzee has won many literary awards, including the CNA Prize, South Africa's premier literary award (three times); the Booker Prize (twice); the Prix Etranger Femina; the Jerusalem Prize; the Lannan Literary Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He lives in Australia Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Lesson 1 Realism	1
Lesson 2 The Novel in Africa	35
Lesson 3 The Lives of Animals	59
1 The Philosophers and the Animals
Lesson 4 The Lives of Animals	91
2 The Poets and the Animals
Lesson 5 The Humanities in Africa	116
Lesson 6 The Problem of Evil	156
Lesson 7 Eros	183
Lesson 8 At the Gate	193
Postscript: Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos	227

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