Description:
Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
In this provocative dialogue, a Nobel laureate novelist and a leading translator investigate the nature of language and the challenges of translation.
"An intelligent, moving, and supremely humane act of criticism that reveals just how difficult and wondrous it can be to inhabit a language that is not your own." -- Merve Emre
Brief description: Born in Cape Town, South Africa, J. M. Coetzee is the author of more than twenty books, including The Pole; Waiting for the Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K, for which Coetzee was awarded the Booker Prize; Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life; and several essay collections. With his novel Disgrace, Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Review Quotes: [Speaking in Tongues is] stimulating and occasionally surprising, with insights that can only arise from two authors who have 'the experience of using our language as if it were a foreign one.'--Henry Hitchings "Wall Street Journal"