Like Stranger Shores (2000), Inner Workings collects J. M. Coetzee’s recent literary essays, many of which first appeared in The New York Review of Books or as introductions. Bound together, they accrue a taste and texture that readers might not have suspected if they encountered these essays in their original publications. Coetzee engages a compelling cluster of twentieth-century writers, including, among others, Italo Svevo, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, V. S. Naipaul, and, likely of special interest to this journal’s readers, Philip Roth. Walt Whitman is the lonely denizen of the nineteenth century.