The Category of Pretend: A Conversation with Makenna Goodman and Brian Gresko
Who am I and where do I go from here?
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Posts Tagged: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Rumpus Exclusive: “Crumbs of Life”
I understand this impulse to tighten and make resistant.
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Notable NYC: 9/22–9/28
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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Notable San Francisco: 9/19–9/25
Literary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Notable Los Angeles: 9/17–9/23
Literary events in and around L.A. this week!
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Faith Adiele
Faith Adiele discusses what it means to be a good literary citizen, the importance of decolonizing travel writing, and how she wants to change the way Black stories are being told.
...moreThe Daily Struggle
Lord knows the world has changed since I wrote this talk, but when the world falls to pieces around us, especially when the world falls to pieces, writers will still sit down to write. As Beckett tells us, even when we have “no power to express” and “no desire to express,” we still have “the obligation […]
...moreThe Appeal of Ferrante and Knausgaard
On Lit Hub, Stephanie Grant examines the deep pleasure and connection readers experience with the works of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. She suspects the familiar tone of both authors’ recent series might help otherwise fiction-averse readers dive into the narrative: To put it another way, the intimacy of first-person narration in these novels […]
...moreA Tough Elevator Pitch
HELLO. I was hoping I would run into you on the elevator today. Here, this scene would be perfect for you: A young man takes an orange from the bowl in the kitchen. He sits on the couch in the living room and peels it. He eats the orange. He gets up and puts the […]
...moreThe Sacred and the Profane in Knausgaard
Is it possible to separate Knausgaard the author from Knausgaard the protagonist? At the New Republic, Tess Crain asks this question, taking a look at the series from a woman’s point of view. By her estimation, Volume 5, just out in English, explains some of Knausgaard’s problematic views on women by framing him as “a […]
...moreProbing into the Space Between
At the New York Times, Karl Ove Knausgaard describes how Joyce’s Portrait included him in literature’s potential in a way that Ulysses didn’t: In “Portrait,” Joyce ventures inside that part of our identity for which no language yet exists, probing into the space between what belongs to the individual alone and what is ours together, exploring […]
...moreI Wanted to Be Seen
Check out highlights from a conversation between Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Chicago Review of Books that range from the question of whether real literature must “burn” to be written, to why there’s no therapy in My Struggle. Heti pursues cultural differences, and Knausgaard speaks about the Nordic code of collective solidarity […]
...moreAll About the Essay
John D’Agata, visionary champion of the essay and master anthologizer, sees the lyric form “partake of the poem in its density and shapeliness, it’s distillation of ideas and musicality of language.” He also sees it as unbound to conventional notions of truth. Writing for Harper’s, Elaine Blair critiques the genre-bending, exploratory practices of writers like David Shields, […]
...moreWhere Are All The “Good” Guys?
For Electric Literature, Liesl Schillinger reflects on his struggles to find examples of “good” men in contemporary fiction, and shares his joy in finding one in Lauren Groff‘s Fates and Furies. Further, he argues that despite the self-deprecating narrator in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the six-volume epic captures an “everyman” whose goodwill helps him to succeed: There is room […]
...moreGreatest Hits of the Heart
Patience. Curiosity. Repetition. Looking again and again. Not imposing a story line. Letting composition emerge through pattern, rhythm, shape, sound, movement. Occasionally … you hit upon a moment of grace. You can’t plan for it. You just have to practice enough so that you’re ready when it comes. The Atlantic has compiled a list of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh discusses her story collection, Vertigo, consciousness, artifice, and simultaneity.
...moreImagine That
Like every other year, in 2015 we wrestled with the knowledge of our constructed selves. But rather than eschew personhood as a postmodernist might, we considered just who we’ve been inventing: What do you write about when you no longer put stock in the idea—the narrative—that nature exists objectively and independently of our stories about […]
...moreYou Write Like A Girl, Knausgaard
Domestic duties are regarded as feminine in popular culture. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous three volume tome, My Struggle, is full of descriptions of domesticity, and he has been showered with highbrow literary praise for them. But would the same be true if he were a woman? What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood […]
...moreFrom Being Definite to Indefinite
There is a vanishing point in our humanity, a point at which the other goes from being definite to indefinite. But this point is also the locus for the opposite movement, in which the other goes from indefinite to definite—and if there is an ethics of the novel, then it is here, in the zone […]
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Against Realism
What is it Ferrante has that American fiction lacks?
...moreLive-Tweeting Grief
“The challenge of memorializing doesn’t favor professionals,” writes Sean Minogue over at Full Stop. So, how are autobiographical narratives of loss by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Joan Didion, or Paul Auster different from therapeutic journaling? Minogue takes a look at how these authors express the everyday details of living after a loss, and how new forms […]
...moreWhich Norwegian Author Is Your Favorite Beatle?
I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of […]
...moreLost in Translation
Last Thursday, Charlie Rose tried to talk to Karl Ove Knausgaard about My Struggle. Or Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to talk to Charlie Rose. They tried.
...moreHere and Afar
Over at WBUR, Radio Open Source calls their program “an American conversation with a global attitude.” The podcast touches on everything from first-reads with James Wood, to Knausgaard on literary mechanics, to Pakistan’s regrettable American marriage in wake of Osama Bin Laden—and for all their worldliness, they’re located right at home. With Christopher Lydon as […]
...moreThe Era of the Very Long Novel
At Vulture, Boris Kachka looks into the recent trend of publishing “mega-books,” with the hopes of answering a seemingly straightforward question: “When did book get so freaking enormous?” In his analysis, Kachka touches upon works by Knausgaard, Tartt, and Catton, all authors of recent works of significant length that have received a great deal of literary acclaim.
...moreThe Scatology of Karl Ove Knausgaard
Finally, the Paris Review answers the question we’ve all been wondering about Karl Ove Knausgaard and his mega-novel My Struggle: what’s with all the shitting? That gratuitous attention to detail may explain why these scenes jump out at readers, but it doesn’t explain Knausgaard’s minor obsession with shit. To be sure, the inclusion of these […]
...moreThe Joy of Knausgaard
For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon works to define “contemporary” literature and wonders where Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle fits into the mix. What he ultimately argues is that contemporary literature is often “project based,” and that Knausgaard’s self-exploratory novel is the most definitive example of this kind of work in recent times: Not only does the title My Struggle claim for Knausgaard the […]
...moreThe Neverending Story
Did Harry Potter turn us into serial readers? Alexander Chee suggests J.K. Rowling and Karl Ove Knausgaard aren’t all that different: We are all after that word-lust, the novel that makes us want to read it as quickly as possible, and when we find it, we experience the paradoxical desire to stay inside the world […]
...moreThe Second Saga
The New York Times Magazine has the second part of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s slow American road trip.
...moreWho Really Struggles Here?
Amy Shearn makes the case for the struggle of author Dorothy Miller Richardson. As much as I do love my dear prolific weirdo Knausgaard, he hasn’t really done anything all that revolutionary. In fact, exactly a century ago, England saw the beginnings of a similarly expansive novel brimming with what Ben Lerner called Knausgaard’s “radical […]
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