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Looking Ahead to My Struggle: Book Six at Los Angeles Review of Books

At Los Angeles Review of Books Archipelago translator Morten Høi Jensen unpacks “The Name and the Number,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essayistic examination of Hitler in the sixth, and final book of the My Struggle series.

“One of the most eccentric and fascinating texts I’ve ever read, and a dizzying immersion into the mind not of a historian or theologian or philosopher, but the idiosyncratic mind of a novelist. This is a central distinction because one of the many things I felt quite strongly as I emerged dizzily from the transfixed state in which I read the essay was that I had just encountered the strangest and most profound defense of the novelist’s art.”

Read the full essay here.

 

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LA Review of Books takes on My Struggle

 

The LA Review of Books has posted a three-part essay on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

In the first installment of this fascinating piece, William Pierce discusses, among other things, Knausgaard’s narrator:

Knausgaard brings back landscape and scale, he restores object and sequence: he attempts (and fails, sure) to re-achieve the sublime, to situate us in our true context of accident, coincidence, surprise, and mystery.

, controlled language:

His restraint shapes every page of the book. He alludes to this in an interview with Kyle Buckley at Hazlitt: “There’s one thing that I’m interested in in the whole book, or a couple of things, and everything else is excluded. […] So it’s very narrow, even if it’s 3,500 pages, it’s very narrow.” His urge to write each sequence to its conclusion — and yet, often, not to do it all at once but to braid in other narratives — is a structuring urge. The smallest moments are tributaries that lead to the larger streams and into the main current. Everything helps him tell what he’s telling, do what he’s doing — it all gives rise to, and supports, a larger point.

, and grand ambition:

With My Struggle, Knausgaard makes a bid — a huge, quixotic one — to restore the possibility of awe, which stems less from the length of the book or its focus on his life than in its colossal ambitions for what a novel can achieve.

 

Definitely read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.

 

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My Struggle: Book Three is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year!

We are pleased to announce that The New York Times Book Review named Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Three a New York Times Notable Book of the Year!

Visit The New York Times website to see the full line-up of the 100 Notable Books of 2014.

 

100 notable books

 

 

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My Struggle: Book Two nominated for the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award

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We are proud to announce that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Two – A Man in Love, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, is nominated for the 2015 International Impac Dublin Literary Award!

“Book 2 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.”

142 books have been nominated by libraries worldwide for the €100,000 award, the world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations for the 2015 Award include 49 novels in translation with works by 37 American, 19 British, 9 Canadian, 9 Australian and 7 Italian authors. For the first time, translated titles comprise over one third (34.5%) of the longlist!

 

Head to Dublin Literary Award’s website to see the full list of nominees.

 

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"Out to where storytelling does not reach:" Karl Ove Knausgaard on the editor’s role

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the My Struggle series, recently penned en essay on the role of the editor, the editing process, and much more. It can be read on Eurozine.

 

To grasp what is going on in those shadows within the blackout zone, it might help to conduct a mental experiment: without the editors, what would the books have been like? In my case, the answer is simple: there would be no books. I would not have been an author. This is not to say that my editor writes the books for me, but rather that his thoughts, ideas and insights are essential for my writing. Those thoughts and ideas and insights of his are his contributions to my work and, therefore, to me; when he edits other writers, he will give them other things. Ideally, the job of editor is undefined and open enough to allow fine-tuning to fit with the demands, expectations, talent and integrity of each individual writer; above all, it is based on trust, and much more dependent on personal characteristics and understanding what people are like than on formal literary competence.”

Click here to read more.

Click below to learn more about the My Struggle series.

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Karl Ove Knausgaard in Conversation with Nicole Krauss at the Community Bookstore

Karl Ove Knausgaard in conversation with Nicole Krauss at Brooklyn’s own Community Bookstore!

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages and was listed among the 2013 Books of the Year by The Wall Street Journal. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists.” She is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Best known for her novels Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House, Krauss’ fiction has been published inThe New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and the 2003 edition of Best American Short Stories. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages.

Karl Ove Knausgaard in Conversation with Nicole Krauss at the Community Bookstore

Karl Ove Knausgaard in conversation with Nicole Krauss at Brooklyn’s own Community Bookstore!

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages and was listed among the 2013 Books of the Year by The Wall Street Journal. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.

Nicole Krauss has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists.” She is the author of the international bestsellers, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Best known for her novels Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House, Krauss’ fiction has been published inThe New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and the 2003 edition of Best American Short Stories. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages.

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Evan Hughes Profiles Karl Ove Knausgaard for The New Republic

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Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norwegian author of the My Struggle series, received a large profile by Evan Hughes in The New Republic. Most exciting to our ears are the hints of a new book in the works:

Before I left, Knausgaard told me something unexpected. “I shouldn’t talk about this,” he said, shaking his head and smiling a little. In interviews, Knausgaard has insisted that he meant what he wrote in the last line of his series: that he is through writing novels. But he told me he is working on a new one. Amid all the turmoil over My Struggle, now he can “sit down and be somewhere else, do something else,” and that carries him forward. Influenced by Borges and Calvino, the new book will have elements of the fantastical, the otherworldly. It won’t be about his life at all.

Read the full profile here.

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My Struggle Book Three Receives Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

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The third installment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett, has received a starred review in Publishers Weekly:

The ever-present threat of Karl Ove’s father provides an engrossing source of tension, however, and Knausgaard skillfully recreates the point of view of a child. This segment of a genre-defying and unusual novel will leave readers hungry for the following installments, and serves as a fine entry point into the series.

Read the full review here.