Morning and Evening

Morning and Evening
Author: Jon Fosse
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2024-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1628975571

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307762718

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun
Author: Monika Žagar
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0295800569

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to Third-Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a token of his admiration and authored a reverential obituary for Hitler in May 1945. For decades, scholars have wrestled with the dichotomy between Hamsun’s merits as a writer and his infamous ties to Nazism. In her incisive study of Hamsun, Monika Zagar refuses to separate his political and cultural ideas from an analysis of his highly regarded writing. Her analysis reveals the ways in which messages of racism and sexism appear in plays, fiction, and none-too-subtle nonfiction produced by a prolific author over the course of his long career. In the process, Zagar illuminates Norway’s changing social relations and long history of interaction with other peoples. Focusing on selected masterpieces as well as writings hitherto largely ignored, Zagar demonstrates that Hamsun did not arrive at his notions of race and gender late in life. Rather, his ideas were rooted in a mindset that idealized Norwegian rural life, embraced racial hierarchy, and tightly defined the acceptable notion of women in society. Making the case that Hamsun’s support of Nazi political ideals was a natural outgrowth of his reactionary aversion to modernity, Knut Hamsun serves as a corrective to scholarship treating Hamsun’s Nazi ties as unpleasant but peripheral details in a life of literary achievement.

Trotsky in Norway

Trotsky in Norway
Author: Oddvar Hoidal
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501758063

From the moment of Lev Trotsky's sensational and unannounced arrival in Oslo harbor in June 1935 he became the center of controversy. Although it was to be the shortest of his four exiles, this period of his life was a significant one. From Norway he increased his effort to create a Fourth International, encouraging his international followers to challenge Stalin's dominance over world communism. In Norway Trotsky wrote his last major book, The Revolution Betrayed, in which he presented himself as the true heir to the Bolshevik Revolution, maintaining that Stalin had violated the Revolution's ideals. His efforts to threaten Stalin from outside of Russia created international repercussions. At first, Trotsky lived peacefully, without a guard and enjoying more freedom in Norway than he experienced in any other country following his expulsion from the USSR. Then, at the first Moscow show trial of August 1936 he was accused of being an international terrorist who organized conspiracies from abroad with the intention of murdering Russian leaders and destroying the Soviet state. Wishing to maintain good relations with its powerful neighbor, the Norwegian cabinet placed Trotsky under house arrest. Internment soon followed. He became the subject of political dispute between the socialist Labor Party government that had granted him asylum and opposition parties from the extreme right to the extreme left. In the national election of October 1936 the issue appeared to threaten the very existence of Norway's first permanent socialist administration. After the election, the Labor government was determined to expel him. No European country would allow him entry, and when Mexico proved willing to offer a final refuge, Trotsky was involuntarily dispatched under police guard to Tampico on board a Norwegian ship. Trotsky in Norway presents a fascinating account—the first complete study in English—of Trotsky's asylum in Norway and his deportation to Mexico. Although numerous biographies of Trotsky have been published, their coverage of his Norwegian sojourn has been inadequate, and in some cases erroneous. A revised and updated edition of Hoidal's highly regarded Norwegian study, published in 2009, this book incorporates information that has since become available. In highly readable prose, Hoidal presents new biographical details about a significant period in Trotsky's life and sheds light on an important chapter in the history of international socialism and communism.

Novel 11, Book 18

Novel 11, Book 18
Author: Dag Solstad
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811228290

A brilliant novel by the Norwegian master Dag Solstad Bjorn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to devote himself to an amateur theater.In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjorn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiotz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjorn carry his preposterous plan through to its logical conclusion. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjorn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he’s tangled up in a game or reality. Dag Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, a concentrated uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author’s remarkable gifts and wit.

My Beautiful Genome

My Beautiful Genome
Author: Lone Frank
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1851688641

Internationally acclaimed science writer Lone Frank swabs up her DNA to provide the first truly intimate account of the new science of consumer-led genomics. She challenges the business mavericks intent on mapping every baby's genome, ponders the consequences of biological fortune-telling, and prods the psychologists who hope to uncover just how much or how little our environment will matter in the new genetic century - a quest made all the more gripping as Frank considers her family's and her own struggles with depression.

The Great Cycle

The Great Cycle
Author: Tarjei Vesaas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1967
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Simply and beautifully written, this universal tale of a boy growing into manhood is told by an author who was also the firstborn and faced with the pressures of inheriting and expectations of working the family farm. Vesaas, however, takes this simple tale into new emotional and linguistic territory, as he poetically presents the experiences of Norwegian peasant life.

My Struggle:

My Struggle:
Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374534144

The provocative, audacious, brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel that has unquestionably been the main event of contemporary European literature. It has earned favorable comparisons to its obvious literary forebears "A la recherche du temps perdu" and "Mein Kampf"Nbut has been celebrated as the rare magnum opus that is intensely, addictively readable.