A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN ART OF THE ESSAY AWARD Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn's reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as "one of the greatest critics of our time" (Poets & Writers). In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays--each one glinting with "verve and sparkle," "acumen and passion"--on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag's Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson's translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles--none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men. Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell's Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, "Private Lives," prefaced by Mendelsohn's New Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, No�l Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn's "sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth."
With invective all the more deadly for its grace and wit, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine, presents a portrait of a feckless American establishment gone large in the stomach and soft in the head. This acerbic commentary on the insouciance of the monied ruling class concludes with a forewarning piece where Lapham looks at the fate of indolent ruling classes throughout history.
Bringing together some of the figures most closely associated with Edward Said and his scholarship, Waiting for the Barbarians looks at Said the public intellectual and literary critic, and his political and intellectual legacy: the future through the lens of his work.
A new collection of twenty-three literary essays from the Nobel Prize–winning author. J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006–2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
Nadine Gordimer has written of J.M. Coetzee that his vision goes to the nerve-centre of being. What he finds there is more than most people will ever know about themselves, and he conveys it with a brilliant writer's mastery of tension and elegance. Doubling the Point takes the reader to the center of that vision. These essays and interviews, documenting Coetzee's longtime engagement with his own culture, and with modern culture in general, constitute a literary autobiography.
Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee is one of the first collections of critical essays on this major contemporary writer. The essays, written by an international cast of contributors, adopt a variety of approaches to Coetzee's often controversial work, taking care to place that work within its wider cultural context. Contributions include essays of more general import, ranging across Coetzee's oeuvre, as well as essays that analyse in more detail individual Coetzee novels. The collection also includes a preface by Coetzee's fellow South African, the internationally acclaimed writer Nadine Gordimer.
#1 New York Times bestseller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco at the hands of a buyout from investment firm KKR. A book that stormed both the bestseller list and the public imagination, a book that created a genre of its own, and a book that gets at the heart of Wall Street and the '80s culture it helped define, Barbarians at the Gate is a modern classic—a masterpiece of investigatory journalism and a rollicking book of corporate derring-do and financial swordsmanship. The fight to control RJR Nabisco during October and November of 1988 was more than just the largest takeover in Wall Street history. Marked by brazen displays of ego not seen in American business for decades, it became the high point of a new gilded age and its repercussions are still being felt. The tale remains the ultimate story of greed and glory—a story and a cast of characters that determined the course of global business and redefined how deals would be done and fortunes made in the decades to come. Barbarians at the Gate is the gripping account of these two frenzied months, of deal makers and publicity flaks, of an old-line industrial powerhouse (home of such familiar products a Oreos and Camels) that became the victim of the ruthless and rapacious style of finance in the 1980s. As reporters for The Wall Street Journal, Burrough and Helyar had extensive access to all the characters in this drama. They take the reader behind the scenes at strategy meetings and society dinners, into boardrooms and bedrooms, providing an unprecedentedly detailed look at how financial operations at the highest levels are conducted but also a richly textured social history of wealth at the twilight of the Reagan era. At the center of the huge power struggle is RJR Nabisco's president, the high-living Ross Johnson. It's his secret plan to buy out the company that sets the frenzy in motion, attracting the country's leading takeover players: Henry Kravis, the legendary leveraged-buyout king of investment firm KKR, whose entry into the fray sets off an acquisitive commotion; Peter Cohen, CEO of Shearson Lehman Hutton and Johnson's partner, who needs a victory to propel his company to an unchallenged leadership in the lucrative mergers and acquisitions field; the fiercely independent Ted Forstmann, motivated as much by honor as by his rage at the corruption he sees taking over the business he cherishes; Jim Maher and his ragtag team, struggling to regain credibility for the decimated ranks at First Boston; and an army of desperate bankers, lawyers, and accountants, all drawn inexorably to the greatest prize of their careers—and one of the greatest prizes in the history of American business. Written with the bravado of a novel and researched with the diligence of a sweeping cultural history, Barbarians at the Gate is present at the front line of every battle of the campaign. Here is the unforgettable story of that takeover in all its brutality. In a new afterword specially commissioned for the story's 20th anniversary, Burrough and Helyar return to visit the heroes and villains of this epic story, tracing the fallout of the deal, charting the subsequent success and failure of those involved, and addressing the incredible impact this story—and the book itself—made on the world.
The international publishing phenomenon Ice Planet Barbarians, now in a special print edition! Fall in love with the out-of-this-world romance between Georgie Carruthers, a human woman, and Vektal, an alien from another planet, in this expanded edition with bonus materials and an exclusive epilogue—in print only! You’d think being abducted by aliens would be the worst thing that could happen to me. And you’d be wrong. Because now the aliens are having ship trouble, and they’ve left their cargo of human women—including me—on an ice planet. We’re not equipped for life in this desolate winter wasteland. Since I’m the unofficial leader, I head out into the snow to look for help. I find help all right. A big blue horned alien introduces himself in a rather . . . startling way. Vektal says that I'm his mate, his chosen female—and that the reason his chest is purring is because of my presence. He’ll help me and my people survive, but this poses a new problem. If Vektal helps us survive, I’m not sure he’s going to want to let me go.
