Following Stranger Shores, which included J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers his literary essays from 2000 to 2005. Among the authors discussed in the first half of the book, several - Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai - experienced the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud. Coetzee further explores the works of six of the greatest writers of 20th-century German literature: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his 'struggle with the German language'. There is an essay on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and on the short literature of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented by Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee concludes the collection with essays on three more Nobel Laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, and V.S. Naipaul.

Pages: 320, Dimensions: 12.9x12.9cm