J M Coetzee

Oct 1, 2023 | literaryreview.co.uk | J M Coetzee

Novelists seldom grow old gracefully. ‘All writers go off,’ as the late Martin Amis once put it, and while they are hardly unique in that respect, when writers go off the consequences can be dire. A late run of mediocrity has a way of souring a literary legacy, which is one reason why new books by distinguished writers make reviewers nervous. Have they finally gone off?

Aug 21, 2023 | fivebooks.com | Brenda Lozano |Annie McDermott |J M Coetzee |Kate Zambreno

Could you talk me through the appeal of writing a counterfactual novel, and what the decision to create an alternate reality offers a novelist? Your latest book, Biography of X, is set in a contemporary United States that is very like, but not quite, our own. After the Second World War, the American South seceded, was run by a theocratic regime, then was reunited with the North.