In the following essay, Lenta discusses Coetzee's life, career, awards and recognition, and overall body of work, while also examining the era in which Coetzee wrote and the critical reception of his works.

In the following essay, Barnard examines the significance of place in Coetzee's novels and critical essays, arguing that his settings are not dystopian, as has been suggested by some critics, but rather "atopian," embodying a feeling of constant displacement.

In the following essay, Marais argues "that J. M. Coetzee's novella 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee' … suggests as much about the ethnocentricity of early South African travel writing" as does early colonial literature.

In the following essay, Easton suggests that Coetzee places his novels in settings other than South Africa in order to symbolically emphasize himself as a "regional" writer, highlighting as he does the feelings of displacement of most South Africans.

In the following essay, Gardiner explores the ways in which Coetzee's novella "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" resembles Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe in its textual codification of European imperialism.

In the following essay, Wright examines Coetzee's fiction as representative of a hostile colonial act in itself.

In the following interview, Coetzee discusses his book Giving Offense and his position on key issues in the debate on censorship.

In the following essay, Bishop questions the veracity of the authorial voice in postcolonial literature written in English and pinpoints Foe as a successful example of this questioning in a textual context.

Three generations of writers, white and black, have tried to arouse South Africans to a recognition of what they saw as a growing spiritual and moral aridity and a tighter political extremism resulting from the systems of apartheid. Now it is 1980, thousands of printed protest pages later, and the National government is still in power, having grown unwieldy and corrupt, but not seriously challenged by white opposition parties and, so far, capable of destroying black opposition before it finds a voice or, ha...

In the following review, Cohen praises White Writing as a valuable addition to the study of post-colonial and post-revolutionary South African culture, although he finds in many of the essays a "rather heavy-handed solemnity of purpose."

In the following review, Kakutani discusses the early elements of Coetzee's life, as described in Boyhood, that led to his later writing career.

In the following review, Bayles praises Coetzee's approach to questions of censorship in Giving Offense.

[Dusklands] includes two separate pieces of novella length—"The Vietnam Project" and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee." The former deals with a Californian who works for a think-tank group which is developing new ways to undermine the bases of Vietnamese culture in 1973; he gradually is going mad in the course of the task. Though there are sound psychological insights on what makes an intelligence man click, I found the basic plot of the piece rather predictable fare. &#x...