From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction gathers into a single volume twenty-three interviews with the British novelist and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) by some of the last half-century's foremost critics, academics, and journalists. Distinguished interviewers-including the renowned scholar Sir Frank Kermode, the theater critic Harold Hobson, and the writer and broadcaster Jonathan Miller-talk with Murdoch about her life, work, and philosophy. The resulting conversations offer access to Murdoch's beliefs on a wide range of topics and on her techniques and intentions as a...

Gillian Dooley surveys the life and work of the 2001 Nobel Laureate for Literature widely viewed as a curmudgeonly novelist who finds special satisfaction in overturning the vogue presuppositions of his peers as it spans Naipaul's expansive literary career from Miguel Street to Magic Seeds.

This book is a consideration of various themes and techniques ranging across famous South African writer J. M. Coetzee's whole oeuvre. It aims to discover the "how" rather than "what" or "why" where does Coetzee's work derive its power? A discussion of themes, influences, and allegorical meanings tends to bleach out the experience of reading; and this experience is surely the only reason for choosing Coetzee's narratives over anyone else's. It examines the type of resistance to be found in his work, a resistance which seems to have little basis in a political belief or a rational philosophy...

Brian Medlin met the novelist Iris Murdoch at Oxford in 1961 when he joined New College as a Research Fellow, and they remained friends for the remainder of her life, though after he left Oxford they only met once again. This correspondence published here covers a period of more than twenty years. In his letters, Medlin regaled Murdoch with Australian jokes, travel stories and anecdotes, and answered her many questions about Australian flora and fauna, and the Australian vernacular. She in turn quizzed him about his radical politics, and they agreed to disagree about Marxism and the...