Books by Karl Ove Knausgaard
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch
A brilliant and personal examination by sensational and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream
In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch’s work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch’s legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgaard tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history’s most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist’s life, as he himself has done. Including reproductions of some of Munch’s most emotionally and psychologically intense works, chosen by Knausgaard, this utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.
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Inadvertent (Why I Write)
The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Why I Write” may prove to be the most difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to answer yet it is central to the project of one of the most influential writers working today. To write, for the Norwegian artist, is to resist easy thinking and preconceived notions that inhibit awareness of our lives. Knausgaard writes to “erode [his] own notions about the world. . . . It is one thing to know something, another to write about it.” The key to enhanced living is the ability to hit upon something inadvertently, to regard it from a position of defenselessness and unknowing. A deeply personal meditation, Inadvertent is a cogent and accessible guide to the creative process of one of our most prolific and ingenious artists.
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Inadvertent (Why I Write)
The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Why I Write” may prove to be the most difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to answer yet it is central to the project of one of the most influential writers working today. To write, for the Norwegian artist, is to resist easy thinking and preconceived notions that inhibit awareness of our lives. Knausgaard writes to “erode [his] own notions about the world. . . . It is one thing to know something, another to write about it.” The key to enhanced living is the ability to hit upon something inadvertently, to regard it from a position of defenselessness and unknowing. A deeply personal meditation, Inadvertent is a cogent and accessible guide to the creative process of one of our most prolific and ingenious artists.
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Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Fredrik Ekelund
Two world-class writers reveal themselves to be the ultimate soccer fans in these collected letters
Karl Ove Knausgaard is sitting at home in Skåne with his wife, four small children, and dog. He is watching soccer on TV and falls asleep in front of the set. He likes 0-0 draws, cigarettes, coffee, and Argentina.
Fredrik Ekelund is away, in Brazil, where he plays soccer on the beach and watches matches with others. Ekelund loves games that end up 4-3 and teams that play beautiful soccer. He likes caipirinhas and Brazil.
Home and Away is an unusual soccer book, in which the two authors use soccer and the World Cup in Brazil as the arena for reflections on life and death, art and politics, class and literature. What does it mean to be at home in a globalized world?
This exchange of letters opens up new vistas and gives us stories from the lives of two creative writers. We get under their skin and gain insight into their relationships with modern times and soccer’s place in their lives, the significance the game has for people in general, and the question Was this the best soccer championship ever?
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In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays
From the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, he reflects openly and with penetrating intelligence on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the northern lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor. Accompanied by black-and-white reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman. They capture Knausgaard's remarkable ability to mediate between the personal and the universal, between life and art. Each piece glimmers with his candor and his longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.
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$20.00
My Struggle: Book 4 (My Struggle, 4)
The fourth installment in the beloved, internationally celebrated My Struggle series from Karl Ove Knausgaard.
My Struggle: Book 4 finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard in a tiny fishing village in northern Norway, where he has been hired as a schoolteacher and is living on his own for the first time. When the ferocious winter takes hold, Karl Ove--in the company of the Håfjord locals, a warm and earthy group who have spent their lives working, drinking, and joking together in close quarters--confronts private demons, reels from humiliations, and is elated by small victories. We are immersed, along with Karl Ove, in this world--sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes serenely beautiful--where memories and physical obsessions burn throughout the endless Arctic winter. In Book 4, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.
"My Struggle: Book Four is an elegiac kind of comic novel, and it is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard. This is to say, it comprises intimate descriptions of daily life, descriptions that build to something improbably greater than the sum of their parts." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle, 5)
The fifth installment in the multi-volume, internationally celebrated My Struggle series from Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The fifth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s powerful My Struggle series is written with tremendous force and sincerity. As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect―he wants it so much that he gets writer’s block. At the same time, he sees his friends, one by one, publish their debuts. He suspects that he will never get anything published. My Struggle: Book 5 is also a book about strong new friendships and a shattering love affair. Then one day Karl Ove reaches two crucial points in his life: his father dies and, shortly thereafter, he completes his first novel.
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My Struggle: Book 3 (My Struggle, 3)
The third volume ―the book that made Karl Ove Knausgaard a phenomenon in the United States―in the addictive New York Times bestselling series, My Struggle.
A family of four―mother, father, and two boys―move to the south coast of Norway, to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory is upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Karl Ove Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet.
Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, My Struggle: Book 3 gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.
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My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (My Struggle, 2)
"[Book 2] sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist [who] wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence." ―James Wood, The New Yorker
In the second installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental six-volume masterpiece, the character Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to Stockholm, where, having left his wife, he leads a solitary existence. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a Nietzschean intellectual and boxing fanatic named Geir. He also tracks down Linda, whom he met at a writers' workshop a few years earlier and who fascinated him deeply.
My Struggle: Book 2 is at heart a love story―the story of Karl Ove falling in love with his second wife. But the novel also tells other stories: of becoming a father, of the turbulence of family life, of outrageously unsuccessful attempts at a family vacation, of the emotional strain of birthday parties for children, and of the daily frustrations, rhythms, and distractions of city life keeping him from (and filling) his novel.
It is a brilliant work that emphatically delivers on the unlikely promise that many hundreds of pages later readers will be left breathlessly demanding more.
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My Struggle: Book 6 (My Struggle, 6)
The final sixth installment in the long-awaited, internationally celebrated My Struggle series from Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The full scope and achievement of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental work is evident in this final installment of his My Struggle series. Grappling directly with the consequences of Knausgaard’s transgressive blurring of public and private, Book 6 is a troubling and engrossing look into the mind of one of the most exciting artists of our time. Knausgaard includes a long essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf, particularly relevant (if not prescient) in our current global climate of ascending dictatorships.
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My Struggle: Book 1 (My Struggle, 1)
A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues―death, love, art, fear―and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.
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Spring
“Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation…Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.”
-The New York Times
"Poignant and beautiful…Even if you think you won’t like Knausgaard, try this one and you’ll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.
So begins Spring, the recommencement of Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.
Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.
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Spring
“Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation…Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.”
-The New York Times
"Poignant and beautiful…Even if you think you won’t like Knausgaard, try this one and you’ll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.
So begins Spring, the recommencement of Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.
Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.
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Autumn
The New York Times bestseller.
"This book is full of wonders...Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.”
—The New York Times
From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons.
28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...
I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice--the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.
Copies
No copies available.
Autumn
The New York Times bestseller.
"This book is full of wonders...Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.”
—The New York Times
From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons.
28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...
I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice--the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.
Copies
No copies available.
Summer
by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard
The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer
2 June--It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn't have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, that your thoughts haven't grasped it yet, and that it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neither exists nor doesn't exist.
The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.
At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.
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Summer
by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard
The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer
The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion. At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.
Copies
No copies available.
Summer
by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard
In 1917, when Edith Wharton published Summer, she was living in a France “steeped in the tragic realities of war.” Yet she set this book far away from Paris and explored her most daring theme—a woman’s awakening to her sexual needs.
Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall, is bored in the small Massachusetts town of North Dormer and ignorant of desire until she meets a visiting architect, Lucius Harney. Like the lush summer of Berkshires around them, their romance is shimmering and idyllic, but its consequences are harsh and real. And the book, for its early twentieth-century audience, was shocking.
Wharton’s pellucid prose, her raw depiction of the mountain community where Charity was born, and Charity’s rites of passage into adulthood elevate Summer into a groundbreaking study of society, nature, and human needs. Joseph Conrad prized this gem of a novel and Wharton also favored it. Now the modern reader can experience the most erotic fiction Edith Wharton ever wrote. This anniversary edition also contains an introduction by notable Wharton scholar Candace Waid.
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Summer
by Edith Wharton, Karl Ove Knausgaard
Considered by some to be her finest work, Edith Wharton’s Summer created a sensation when first published in 1917, as it was one of the first novels to deal honestly with a young woman’s sexual awakening.
Summer is the story of Charity Royall, a child of mountain moonshiners adopted by a family in a poor New England town, who has a passionate love affair with Lucius Harney, an educated man from the city. Wharton broke the conventions of women’s romantic fiction by making Charity a thoroughly independent modern woman—in touch with her emotions and sexuality, yet kept from love and the larger world she craves by the overwhelming pressures of heredity and society.
Praised for its realism and honesty by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James and compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Summer remains as fresh and powerful a novel today as when it was first written.
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$5.95
Winter
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Christopher Nicholson
The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter
2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time.
In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays--to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.
Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.
Copies
No copies available.
Winter
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Christopher Nicholson
The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter
2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time.
In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays--to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze.
Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.
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Winter
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Christopher Nicholson
“[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy’s life” (The New York Times).
A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The Elephant Keeper.
The novel focuses on true events surrounding the London theater dramatization of Hardy’s acclaimed novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, including Hardy’s hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude Bugler to play Tess. As plans for the play solidify, Hardy’s interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy’s reclusive, neglected wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy’s desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealousy and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters―with devastating results.
Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Winter is “a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
“A book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter’s night, while she holds her baby in her arms.”―The Washington Post
“Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness.”―Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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The Morning Star: A Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
One of NPR's Best Books of 2021
"Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
The international bestseller from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes.
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.
Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?
The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.
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The Morning Star: A Novel
A New York Times Notable Book
One of NPR's Best Books of 2021
"Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times
The international bestseller from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a night shift when one of her patients escapes.
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding.
Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport – but is he actually dead?
The Morning Star is about life in all its mundanity and drama, the strangeness that permeates our world, and the darkness in us all. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s astonishing new novel, his first after the My Struggle cycle, goes to the utmost limits of freedom and chaos, to what happens when forces beyond our comprehension are unleashed and the realms of the living and the dead collide.
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$19.00
The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel
An NPR Best Book of 2023
“Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel.” —The Washington Post
“The Wolves of Eternity, like some 19th-century Russian novel, wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review
From the internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a sprawling and deeply human novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves—and the limits of what we can understand about life itself
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.
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$35.00
The Third Realm: A Novel
From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us
Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams—the star is back. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star, and The Wolves of Eternity portrayed the intimate experiences of two estranged half siblings decades before the star rises. In The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.
With this next novel, the limitless scale and ambition of Knausgaard’s new universe is clear. This is life, death, the human condition and the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.
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$32.00
My Struggle: Book Six
The final installment in the long awaited, internationally celebrated My Struggle series.
The full scope and achievement of Knausgaard's monumental work is evident in this final installment of his My Struggle series. Grappling directly with the consequences of Knausgaard's transgressive blurring of public and private Book Six is a troubling and engrossing look into the mind of one of the most exciting artists of our time. Knausgaard includes a long essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf, particularly relevant (if not prescient) in our current global climate of ascending dictatorships.
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My Struggle: Book Four
At eighteen years old, Karl Ove moves to a tiny fisherman's village in the far north of the Arctic circle to work as a school teacher. No interest in the job itself, his intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine. He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals, and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls. But as the darkness of the long arctic nights start to consume the landscape, Karl Ove's life takes a darker turn. His writing repeats itself, his drinking escalates to some disturbing blackouts, his attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and to his distress, he also develops romantic feelings towards one of his students. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his high school years and the roots of his current problems. Ever present is the long shadow cast by his father, whose own sharply increasing alcohol consumption serves as an ominous backdrop to the author's lifestyle.
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My Struggle: Book Five
The fifth book of Knausgaard's powerful My Struggle series is written with tremendous force and sincerity. As a nineteen-year-old, Karl Ove moves to Bergen and invests all of himself in his writing. But his efforts get the opposite effect - he wants it so much that he gets writer's block. At the same time, he sees his friends, one-by-one, publish their debuts. He suspects that he will never get anything published. Book Five is also a book about strong new friendships and a shattering love affair. Then one day Karl Ove reaches two crucial points in his life: his father dies, and shortly thereafter, he completes his first novel.
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A Time for Everything
A spellbinding pursuit of divine mysteries from the celebrated author of My Struggle
“The writing glows with an intense awareness of the here and now, and loving observations of landscapes and objects . . . an extraordinary novel, and completely original.” —The Independent
In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings—one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch. This event is decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine.
Stretching from the Garden of Eden to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines key allegorical encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes—from the Bible and beyond--Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight. The result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic, spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?
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My Struggle: Book Three
A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.
"Of course, I remember nothing from this time. It is completely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed; this is in fact so difficult it almost seems wrong to use the word 'I' when referring to it, lying in the baby bath, for instance, its skin unnaturally red, its arms and legs sprawling, and its face distorted in a scream no one remembers the reason for anymore ... Is that creature the same as the one sitting here in Malmö, writing this?"
--from Book Three of My Struggle
More praise for Book Three:
"A superbly told childhood story ... Knausgaard writes about everyday life as a child with a flow and continuity that all hangs together ... the text has a gravitational pull that draws the reader in only further." --Dag Og Tid (Norway)
"An aesthetic pleasure ... A patient, chiseled, and intense portrayal of a child's sensory experience. Book Three is a classic." --Klassekampen (Norway)
"Compelling reading ... Knausgaard has an equally good eye for small and large events." --Aftenposten (Norway)
"A gripping novel ... This childhood portrayal drifts off with a lightness and sensitivity that not many will associate with him ... There is no doubt that the series is worth following the author all the way." --Dagens Næringsliv (Norway)
"The man can write a novel about a solid, pretty traditional upbringing too ... A sensitive, sharp depiction of growing up in the 70's." --Adresseavisen (Norway)
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In the Land of the Cyclops
Knausgaard’s struggle is still ongoing with In the Land of the Cyclops as he continues to navigate the fjord of truth between reality and experience
“This, which we perhaps could call inexhaustible precision, is the goal of all art, and its essential legitimacy.” —Jessica Ferri, The Los Angeles Times
In his first essay collection to be published in English, the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series Karl Ove Knausgaard explores art, philosophy, and literature with piercing candor and remarkable erudition.
Paired with full color-images, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman’s photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill’s eye, and tussle with the inner mechanics of Ingmar Bergman’s workbooks. In one essay he describes the figure of Francesca Woodman, arms coiled in birch bark and reaching up toward the sky—a tree. In another, he unearths Sally Mann’s photographs of decomposing corpses, so much so that branches and limbs, hair and grass, begin to harmonize.
Each essay bristles with Knausgaard’s searing honesty and longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.
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A Very Scandinavian Christmas: The Greatest Nordic Holiday Stories of All Time (Very Christmas, 4)
by Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlof, August Strindberg, Karl Ove Knausgaard
Our fourth book in the very popular Very Christmas series, this collection brings together the best Scandinavian holiday stories including classics by Hans Christian Andersen of Denmark; Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg, and Hjalmar Söderberg of Sweden; as well as the acclaimed contemporary Norwegian authors Karl Ove Knausgaard and National Book Award nominee Vigdis Hjorth. These Nordic tales—coming from the very region where so much of traditional Christmas imagery originates—convey a festive and contemplative spirit laden with lingonberries, elks, gnomes, Sami trolls, candles, gingerbread, and aquavit in abundance. A smorgasbord of unexpected literary gifts that make up a vibrant, elegant hardcover volume sure to provide plenty of pleasure and hygge, that specifically Scandinavian blend of coziness and contentment.
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My Struggle: Book One
Almost ten years have passed since Karl Ove Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. Vulnerable and assailed by doubts, he is now embarking on a new novel. With an uncanny eye for detail, Knausgaard breaks down his own life story to its elementary particles, reliving memories, reopening wounds, and examining with candor the turbulence and the epiphanies that emerge from his own experience of fatherhood, the fallout in the wake of his father's death, and his visceral connection to music, art, and literature. Karl Ove's dilemmas strike nerves that give us raw glimpses of our particular moment in history as we witness what happens to the sensitive and churning mind of a young man trying- as if his very life depended on it- to find his place in the disjointed world around him. This Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.
Intense and vital... The need for totality . . . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages . . .
The concluding sentences of the book [are] placid, plain, achieved. They have what Walter Benjamin called 'the epic side of truth, wisdom.' --James Wood, The New Yorker
"While not unconcerned with finding objective truth in the moments he recounts, Mr. Knausgaard aims first to simply record them, to try to shape the banal into something worth remembering. Beautifully rendered and, at times, painfully observant, his book does a superlative job of finding that "inner core of human existence." --The Wall Street Journal
Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing honesty, My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man consciousness. -- Philip Lopate
Karl Ove--with his shyness, his passion, his honesty--can take on any subject and make it his own. -- Edmund White
I read both books [One and Two] hungrily and find myself already missing Knausgaard just a few days after turning A Man in Love's last page, searching the Web for inexpensive crash courses in Norwegian, mostly just wishing Volume Three were available in English now. --Jonathan Callahan, The Millions
Knausgaard's preternatural facility for description, the dreamy thickness of his prose, speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure. -- Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5 (Knausgaard)
At twenty, Karl Ove moves to Bergen. As the youngest student to be admitted to the prestigious Writing Academy, he arrives full of excitement and writerly aspirations.
Soon though, he is stripped of youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile and clichéd, and his social efforts are a dismal failure. Awkward in company and hopeless with women, he drowns his shame in drink and rock music.
Then, little by little, things take a brighter turn. He falls in love, gives up writing in favour of the steady rewards of literary criticism, and the beginnings of an adult life take shape.
That is, until his self-destructive binges and the irresistible lure of the writer’s struggle pull him back.
In this fifth instalment of the My Struggle cycle, Karl Ove discloses his personal and often deeply shameful battles with introversion, alcohol abuse, infidelity and artistic ambition. Knausgaard writes with unflinching honesty to deliver the full drama of everyday life, in a breathless novel poised between a desperate yearning to be good, and the terrible power of transgression.
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My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love
Book Two of the six-volume literary masterwork My Struggle flows with the same raw energy and candor that ignited the series’ unprecedented bestselling run in Scandinavia, a virulent controversy, and an avalanche of literary awards. Knausgaard breaks down lived experience into its elementary particles, revealing the wounds and epiphanies of a truly examined life. Walking away from everything he knows in Bergen, Karl Ove finds himself in Stockholm, where he waits for the next stretch of the road to reveal itself. He strikes up a deep friendship with another exiled Norwegian, a boxing fanatic and intellectual named Geir. He reconnects with Linda, a vibrant poet who had captivated him at a writers’ workshop years earlier, and the shape of his world changes. Book Two exposes the inner landscape of a man falling in love and the fraught joys and impossible predicaments he faces as a new father. We look on as he watches his life unfold. Love, rage, and beauty flood these pages. Knausgaard writes with exhilarating honesty and insight about the collection of moments that make up a life – the life of someone with an irrepressible need to write, of someone for whom art and the natural world are physical needs, of someone for whom death is always standing in the corner, of someone who craves solitude and love from the depths of his being.
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The Third Realm A Novel
“The people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona . . . Enthralling . . . you can’t stop reading.” —Lev Grossman, The Atlantic
“One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world.” —Brandon Taylor, The Washington Post
From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us
For several days, a strange and bright new star in the sky above Norway has sown an unyielding sense of foreboding, of agitation, and of fear. Tove, a painter on holiday with her family, has spiraled into a psychosis that stirs her into a flurry of unbridled creativity. Geir, a policeman who has been investigating a grisly triple murder, comes to a sinister revelation he must keep to himself. Nineteen-year-old Line falls in love with the lead singer of a metal band and is lured into a secret and frightening world.
But most bewildering, and disquieting, is the discovery made by Syvert, an undertaker: since the star has appeared, no one has died.
In The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard returns to the spellbinding world of The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, as a cast of new and familiar characters continue to reckon with the meaning of this star. What is haunting them, and why?
As supernatural forces collide with the mundanities of the everyday, and the threshold between life and death becomes diffuse, people are forced to live their lives as before while the world around them slowly changes in inexplicable ways. Piercing through human existence into the bestial and phantasmagorical, Knausgaard flings open the gates to our most distressing neuroses and forces us to ask: What happens if the dark forces in the world are set free?
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The Wolves of Eternity A Novel
An NPR Best Book of 2023
“Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel.” —The Washington Post
“The Wolves of Eternity, like some 19th-century Russian novel, wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review
From the internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a sprawling and deeply human novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves—and the limits of what we can understand about life itself
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.
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