Love


Hanne Ørstavik - 1997
    Their distance has fatal consequences.Love is the story of Vibeke and Jon, a mother and son who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It's the day before Jon's birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library. From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter's night - while a sense of uneasiness grows. Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences.

Professor Andersens natt


Dag Solstad - 1996
    A master of Norwegian literature critiques contemporary society with wry wit.It is Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pål Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. Professor Andersen fails to report the crime. The days pass, and he becomes paralysed by indecision. Desperate for respite, the professor sets off to a local sushi bar, only to find himself face to face with the murderer.Professor Andersen's Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel of apathy, rebellion and morality. In flinty prose, Solstad presents an uncomfortable question: would we, like his cerebral protagonist, do nothing?

Marta Oulie


Sigrid Undset - 1907
    And yet, Sigrid Undset had a gift for depicting modern women “sympathetically but with merciless truthfulness,” as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. At the time she was one of the youngest recipients and only the third woman so honored. It was Undset’s honest story of a young woman’s love life—“the immoral kind,” as she herself bluntly put it—that made her first novel an instant sensation in Norway.Marta Oulie, written in the form of a diary, intimately documents the inner life of a young woman disappointed and constrained by the conventions of marriage as she longs for an all-consuming passion. Set in Kristiania (now Oslo) at the beginning of the twentieth century, Undset’s book is an incomparable psychological portrait of a woman whose destiny is defined by the changing mores of her day—as she descends, inevitably, into an ever-darker reckoning. Remarkably, though Undset’s other works have attracted generations of readers, Marta Oulie has never before appeared in English translation. Tiina Nunnally, whose award-winning translation of Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter captured the author’s beautifully clear style, conveys the voice of Marta Oulie with all the stark poignancy of the original Norwegian.

Autumn


Karl Ove Knausgård - 2015
    Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice—the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention.This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.

The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am


Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold - 2009
    After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world—to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme: A Novel


Lars Mytting
    An international bestseller and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Prize, it tells the story of Edvard and starts at his family’s tree farm in Norway, where he was raised by his grandfather. The death of Edvard’s parents when he was three has always been a mystery but he knows that the fate of his grandfather’s brother, Einar, is somehow connected. One day a coffin is delivered to the farm for his grandfather, long before the grandfather’s death––a meticulous, beautiful, and unique piece of craftsmanship with the hallmarks of a certain master craftsman––raising the thought that Einar isn’t dead after all. Edvard is now driven to unravel the mystery of his parents’ death. Following a trail of clues from Norway to the Shetland Islands to the battlefields of France and sixteen ancient walnut trees colored by poison gas in World War I, Edvard ultimately discovers a very unusual inheritance. Spanning a century and masterfully navigating themes of revenge and forgiveness, love and loneliness, The Sixteen Trees of the Somme displays the rich talents of Lars Mytting––whose novels have sold over a million copies worldwide––in a story that is utterly compelling and unforgettable.

The Birds


Tarjei Vesaas - 1957
    Their routine, isolated existence is interrupted when a lumberjack arrives at their lakeside cottage and falls in love with Hege, leaving Mattis fearful that he will lose his sister. The careful translation from the Norwegian underscores Vesaas's rare sensitivity in recording Mattis's often insightful view of his world. With a limited understanding of the unpredictable power of nature, Mattis nonetheless turns to the elements to discover the answers—with unsettling results.

Replacement


Tor Ulven - 1993
    These people reminisce, dream, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each fantasizing about how their lives might have turned out differently. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.

Beyond Sing the Woods


Trygve Gulbranssen - 1933
    For the 2005 Norwegian edition, see: ISBN13: 9788203189081.The story of three generations of an old-lineage Norwegian family making their life in the northern woods (circa 1750's.) Main themes are the struggle between tradition and innovation, the prejudices of pastoral society, and a study in human nature and man's ability to make peace with it.

Long Live the Post Horn!


Vigdis Hjorth - 2012
    Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognize the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

Naïve. Super


Erlend Loe - 1996
    He writes lists, obsesses over the nature of time, and finds joy in bouncing balls--all in an effort to find out how best to live life. An utterly enchanting meditation on experience, Naive. Super was a #1 best-seller in Erlend Loe's native Norway.

Melancholy


Jon Fosse - 1995
    "Melancholy" takes us deep inside a painter's fragile consciousness, vulnerable to everything but therefore uniquely able to see its beauty and its light.

Tales of Protection


Erik Fosnes Hansen - 1998
    His reveries lead him to tell two other tales--one of a doomed lighthouse keeper on a Swedish island and the other of a rivalry among Renaissance artists--and finally he tells a startling tale from his own youth. For readers of Michael Ondaatje and Isak Dinesen, Erik Fosnes Hansen's imaginative narration brings an original and searching inquiry into why things happen the way they do and suggests a theory of "seriality"--a half-science about the power of human connections.

The Collected Short Stories, Vol 1: 100 Short Stories


Anton Chekhov - 1880
    In this volume, the reader will find one hundred of his best stories:THE DARLING ARIADNE POLINKA ANYUTA THE TWO VOLODYAS THE TROUSSEAU THE HELPMATE TALENT AN ARTIST'S STORY THREE YEARS THE LADY WITH THE DOG A DOCTOR'S VISIT AN UPHEAVAL IONITCH THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY THE BLACK MONK VOLODYA AN ANONYMOUS STORY THE HUSBAND THE PARTY TERROR A WOMAN'S KINGDOM A PROBLEM THE KISS 'ANNA ON THE NECK' THE TEACHER OF LITERATURE NOT WANTED TYPHUS A MISFORTUNE A TRIFLE FROM LIFE THE WIFE DIFFICULT PEOPLE THE GRASSHOPPER A DREARY STORY THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR THE MAN IN CASE GOOSEBERRIES ABOUT LOVE THE LOTTERY TICKET THE BISHOP THE LETTER EASTER EVE A NIGHTMARE THE MURDER UPROOTED THE STEPPE THE CHORUS GIRL VEROTCHKA MY LIFE AT A COUNTRY HOUSE A FATHER ON THE ROAD ROTHSCHILD'S FIDDLE IVAN MATVEYITCH ZINOTCHKA BAD WEATHER A GENTLEMAN FRIEND A TRIVIAL INCIDENT THE HORSE-STEALERS WARD NO. 6 THE PETCHENYEG A DEAD BODY A HAPPY ENDING THE LOOKING-GLASS OLD AGE DARKNESS THE BEGGAR A STORY WITHOUT A TITLE IN TROUBLE FROST A SLANDER MINDS IN FERMENT GONE ASTRAY AN AVENGER THE JEUNE PREMIER A DEFENCELESS CREATURE AN ENIGMATIC NATURE A HAPPY MAN A TROUBLESOME VISITOR AN ACTOR'S END THE SCHOOLMASTER ENEMIES THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE BETROTHED FROM THE DIARY OF A VIOLENT-TEMPERED MAN IN THE DARK A PLAY A MYSTERY STRONG IMPRESSIONS DRUNK THE MARSHAL'S WIDOW A BAD BUSINESS IN THE COURT BOOTS JOY LADIES A PECULIAR MAN AT THE BARBER'S AN INADVERTENCE THE ALBUMContains an active table of contents for easy reference.This unexpurgated edition contains the complete text with errors and omissions corrected.

Wait, Blink


Gunnhild Øyehaug - 2008
    Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters’ stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous