Coetzee Is Available

To the Editors:

May I please correct a misapprehension in the otherwise admirable article by X, “Fall of a House” [NYR, August 13].

X suggests that J.M. Coetzee “is perhaps the most interesting writer of the three but he is published only locally and so is not much known outside South Africa.”

Happily this is not so. We published his second book In the Heart of the Country in both England and South Africa in 1977 to a warm critical reception and it was published in America by Harper and Row.

Last year we published his finest book to date, Waiting for the Barbarians, which got the leading literary prize in South Africa, the CNA Award, and also received in England two of the most prestigious literary prizes, the James Tait Black and the Geoffrey Faber Award and received remarkable critical attention. Waiting for the Barbarians is to be published by Viking/Penguin in America as a trade paperback shortly and both of these books have been or are being translated into French, Swedish, and Danish with other languages in the offing.

T.G. Rosenthal

Chairman, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

London, England