Karl Ove Knausgaard
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All 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…
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Where 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,…
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Greatest 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…
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The Rumpus Interview with Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh discusses her story collection, Vertigo, consciousness, artifice, and simultaneity.
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Imagine 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…
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You 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…
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From 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…
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Live-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…
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Which 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…
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Lost 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.
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Here 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…
