Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | White Writing | 1988 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 2 | Doubling the Point | 1992 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 3 | Giving Offense | 1996 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 4 | Stranger Shores | 2001 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 5 | The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003 | 2003 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 6 | Inner Workings | 2007 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 7 | Here and Now | 2012 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 8 | The Good Story | 2015 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 9 | Late Essays | 2017 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 10 | J.M. Coetzee - Photographs from Boyhood | 2020 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
| 11 | Speaking in Tongues | 2025 | J.M. Coetzee | Buy |
J.M. Coetzee’s non-fiction reveals the intellectual framework behind his fiction. White Writing examines South African literature and the idea of landscape in colonial writing. Giving Offense tackles censorship and offense across cultures. His later essay collections — Stranger Shores, Inner Workings, and Late Essays — gather literary criticism covering authors from Samuel Beckett to Philip Roth.
His conversational works include Here and Now, a published correspondence with Paul Auster, and The Good Story, a dialogue with psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz about the relationship between fiction and truth. The Nobel Lecture (2003) offers his most concentrated statement about the role of the writer.