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published May 2013
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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.
Read an excerpt of Book Two introduced by James Wood in The New Yorker.
Read Daniel Fraser's interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard here.
Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality.
"—La Repubblica, ItalyA rope round the neck, a knife in the heart. The book is full of magic. The world simply opens up ... Knausgaard will have the same status as Henrik Isben and Knut Hamsun.
"—Kristeligt Dagblad, DenmarkThe most significant literary enterprise of our times.
"—The GuardianKnausgaard . . . strips away the literary tricks, bursts through language, explodes artifice . . . Honest and wise . . . rare properties in contemporary writing . . . Book Two sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate idealist and not just a tetchy complainer. He wants to create great art, and he wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern bourgeois existence.
"—James Wood
One of the most important poets of postwar literature. Valente's work ... answers to a single commitment: with the word.
"—El País (Spain)
Among the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded . . . it should be, first and foremost, an educational ‘must’ for adults.
"—W. H. Auden, The New York TimesEveryone should possess and know Grimm’s Fairy Tales–one of the great books of the world.
"—Richard Adams, The New York Times Book ReviewThe reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is. Even people who have never known hunger, let alone a murderous stepmother, still have a sense—from dreams, from books, from news broadcasts—of utter blackness, the erasure of safety and comfort and trust. Fairy tales tell us that such knowledge, or fear, is not fantastic but realistic. … The Grimm tales still invoke nature, more than God, as life’s driving force, and nature is not kind.
"—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
[Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept ... Wonderfully thought-provoking and beautiful.
"—Alan Cheuse, All Things ConsideredLike good short fiction, the stories in this volume act in ways that suggest a wider world outside the frame of the story.
"—Sycamore ReviewA witty and subtle meditation on the limits of memory and imagination.
"—Nick Hornby, Times Literary SupplementThere is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects.
"—The San Francisco Examiner
Ritsos' breath raises a wind in which wafted and swirled flakes from the crust of our land, seeds of its vegetation and sparks of its sky. Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name a major part of all those things that are there before their eyes and restoration of his work to its totality is an imperative duty to the Greek nation itself, which deserves to regain its unity after nearly forty years of strife.
"—Pantelis PrevelakisRitsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written.
"—Cathi ShawIts power comes from the way it blends the diaristic with the poetic ... There is no pity in the book, nor resignation, despite the circumstance. That clarity ... has to do with giving witness, with the idea of poetry as testimony. Again and again, Ritsos records the smallest moments, as if were he to leave out a single detail of his incarceration, the whole experience might disappear. This is what poetry can do: preserve the moments that would otherwise be forgotten, and in so doing, recreate the world.
"—David Ulin, LA Times
A seamless epic . . . Fresh and surprising . . . Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that the poem that praises beauty must swallow all of death, and Stone Upon Stone does just that: illuminating the balance of beauty and brutality that defines our existence. . . . When Szymek says, 'The whole world is one big language,' we believe it. We cup our ears to listen. . . . That Stone Upon Stone reads like the grand novel it is, not a novel in translation, is a testament to Johnston's work and Mysliwski's singular vision.
"—OrionLike a more agrarian Beckett, a less gothic Faulkner, a slightly warmer Laxness, Mysliwski masterfully renders in Johnston's gorgeous translation (Mysliwski's first into English) life in a Polish farming village before and after WWII. . . . Richly textured and wonderfully evocative, the novel renders Szymus as a distinctly memorable character, whose humor and hard-earned wisdom lend beauty to a bleak vision of a land destroyed by war and ravaged by history, and whose voice--sometimes warm, sometimes ornery, always elegiac--is undeniably original, his digressions and ruminations forming a story that reminds us that 'words are a great grace. When it comes down to it, what are you given other than words?'
"—Publishers Weekly, starredSweeping . . . irreverent . . With winning candor . . . Pietruszka chronicles the modernization of rural Poland and celebrates the persistence of desire.
"—The New YorkerA marvel of narrative seduction, a rare double masterpiece of storytelling and translation. . . . Mysliwski's prose, replete with wit and an almost casual intensity, skips nimbly from one emotional register to the next, carrying dramatic force. . . . He manages tone so finely, orchestrating a perfect continuity between the tragic and the comic and, ultimately, between life and death. . . . In his translation Bill Johnston navigates Mysliwski's modulations with skill and the lightness of touch that is generally the face of profound labour.
"—TImes Literary Supplement
Reading Miljenko Jergovic's Sarajevo Marlboro is like wrapping yourself in a quilt of 29 patches, with each patch personalizing the horrors of the Bosnian War in ways that are engaging, humorous, and unendingly sad. If we are ever to learn to avoid carnage it will be through such acts of constant humanizing as are captured in Jergovic's amazing work.
"—Richard WileyLike all great war books, Sarajevo Marlboro is not about war—it’s about life. Jergovic is an enormously talented storyteller, so the people under siege come through in all their poignant fullness. And one more thing: this book does not belong to the literature of complaining, much too common these days—Sarajevo Marlboro is a book for the people who appreciate life.
"—Aleksandar HemonRead this book. These spare tales speak of all that may yet befall us if we forget our essential fragility; by showing that while what unites us is undeniable, what we allow to divide us too easily becomes murderous. This classic of anti-war writing is a warning about the immense human cost of following those who would have us hate others.
"—Richard Flanagan
Nichita Stanescu blasted open the prison-gates of Socialist realism in Romanian poetry, and all of us rushed out, reveling in the freedom he gave us. His poems display an astounding brillliance that time has not tarnished. These splendid translations by Sean Cotter will introduce English speakers to a universal genius.
"—Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected PoemsFor those – sadly most of us – unacquainted with this brilliant post-World War II Romanian poet’s prolific accomplishment, this selection should prove a revelation. During a historical period of all-too-familiar repression and enforced orthodoxy, his work surged off the page with that liberty only the most gifted and courageous artists possess, giving the lie to the lies around him, and the slant truths of poetry to his listeners.
"—Michael PalmerFor a poet who is thought of as one of the defining Romanian voices of the mid-20th century, Stănescu is poorly represented in English ... Archipelago’s fuller treatment is long overdue. Stănescu is one of the poets who broke through the socialist-realism sound barrier and propelled Romanian poetry into new spheres. He has been revered for decades in Romania as a great voice and it is our considerable good fortune that Cotter has helped us to see why.
"—The Arts FuseStănescu has a gift for creating active, startling images. . . In Wheel With a Single Spoke ... Stănescu is at his best; he examines the nature of time, space and geometry, and in the friction between science and lyric impulse, produces some of his most beautiful lines. We’re lucky that, nearly thirty years after his death, his voice still comes through, clearer than ever.
"—Words Without Borders
Elias Khoury's latest novel returns to a golden age. Beirut in the 30s, unoccupied Palestine and a love affair recalled through a set of dream sequences: an Arab spring of a very different sort.
"—Tariq AliNo Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon . . . Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world.
"—Washington Post Book WorldElias Khoury is a pure storyteller. A writer who understands the hypnotic power of words, and who lets this power become the actual subject of his books. Of course, alongside the words, there is reality, palpable, sensuous, atrocious.
"—Le Nouvel ObservateurAn enchanting hymn to the Middle East, infused with the richness and beauty of classical Arabic poetry.
"—The Guardian (UK)Enthralling . . . Mesmerizing.
"—The Economist (UK)There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion.
"—New York Times Book ReviewGives the flavor of a very important novelist's core philosophies and obsessions through a woman's last memories. . . . Marilyn Booth does well rebuilding the book's carefully crafted, circling sentences in smooth English.
"—M. Lynx Qualey, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis also returns us to the shared historical beginnings of poetry and religious text, the shared tools of verse and image... Though religious texts have also been famously open to widely differing interpretations, those interpretations have tended to view themselves as corrective and final. No such finality will be possible here. The richness of imagery and slewing of the narrative in more than one direction work against any such tactic.
"—Alistair Noon, Blackbox ManifoldFire. Germination. Birth. Blood. All these themes are burnished and boned image by image until they echo through Abdellatif's book.... Abdellatif Laâbi, as you will see, is a member of the same cell as Dostoevsky, Hikmet, Soyinka, Cervantes...
"—Breyten Breytenbach, for Rue du RetourThe great power and subtlety of the work lies in the fine balance it strikes between that Peter Pan–like sensitivity, vulnerability and imagination, and the brutality of the real world, history and politics.
"—The Daily Star (Lebanon)One of the most evocative portraits of Fez that has ever been written ... deserves a wide and attentive readership ... The writer has a fine eye for the telltale details of daily life, for the personality traits of colorful characters, for the labyrinthine urban layout of the town and for the mores of the period ... André Naffis-Sahely’s translation is lively and even, often, joyful.
"—The Arts Fuse
There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive and remarkable effects.
"—The San Francisco Examiner[Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept ... Wonderfully thought-provoking and beautiful.
"—Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things ConsideredA witty and subtle meditation on the limitations of memory and imagination.
"—Nick Hornby, Times Literary SupplementLike good short fiction, the stories in this volume act in ways that suggest a wider world outside the frame of the story.
"—Sycamore Review
Elisabeth Rynell's language can only be described as breathtakingly beautiful.
"—Upsala New DailyElisabeth Rynell is one of Sweden’s most intense and, for the lyrical clarity of her voice, most intensely appreciated storytellers in prose and verse. She never wastes words.
"—Rika Lesser
Ripe to Burst
His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It's a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can't imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.
"—Edwidge Danticat, Haitian-American author