Professor Andersens Night

Download or read book Professor Andersen's Night written by Dag Solstad and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark and moving examination of one man’s derailed life, by the Norwegian master who is “without question, Norway’s bravest, most intelligent novelist” (Per Petterson) In this existential murder mystery, it is Christmas Eve, and fifty-five-year-old professor Pal Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. Failing to report the crime, he becomes paralyzed by his indecision. Professor Andersen’s Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel, written in Dag Solstad’s signature concise, dark, and witty prose. "He’s a kind of surrealistic writer, of very strange novels," Haruki Murakami wrote. "I think he is serious literature".

Download or read book Novel 11, Book 18 written by Dag Solstad and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant novel by the Norwegian master Dag Solstad Bjorn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to devote himself to an amateur theater.In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjorn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiotz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjorn carry his preposterous plan through to its logical conclusion. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjorn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he’s tangled up in a game or reality. Dag Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, a concentrated uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author’s remarkable gifts and wit.

Download or read book Armand V written by Dag Solstad and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Directions proudly introduces two novels in English by the Norwegian master, who is “without question, Norway’s bravest, most intelligent novelist” (Per Petterson) Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he’s caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain for Western intervention. He hides behind knowing, ironic statements, which no one grasps and which change nothing. Armand’s son joins the Norwegian SAS to fight in the Middle East, despite being specifically warned against such a move by his father, and this leads to catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences. Told exclusively in footnotes to an unwritten book, this is Solstad’s radically unconventional novel about how we experience the passing of time: how it fragments, drifts, quickens, and how single moments can define a life.

Download or read book Shyness and Dignity written by Dag Solstad and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years. He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis. Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Download or read book T Singer written by Dag Solstad and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘A kind of surrealist writer’ (Haruki Murakami), who ‘doesn’t write to please other people’ (Lydia Davis). T Singer is the new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers, proving ‘good literature makes us wiser about life, ourselves and other people’ (Dagbladet). Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life. T Singer is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about indomitable loneliness, laying bare the existential questions of life in Solstad’s classic, bleakly comic style. Winner of the Norwegian Critics Prize

Download or read book Stranger Magic written by Marina Warner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-03 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.

Download or read book Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist written by Russell McCormmach and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the end of an historical epoch, but to an old professor of physics, Victor Jakob, sitting in his unlighted study, eating dubious bread with jam made from turnips, it is the end of a way of thinking in his own subject. Younger men have challenged the classical world picture of physics and are looking forward to observational tests of Einstein's new theory of relativity as well as the creation of a quantum mechanics of the atom. It is a time of both apprehension and hope. In this remarkable book, the reader literally inhabits the mind of a scientist while Professor Jakob meditates on the discoveries of the past fifty years and reviews his own life and career--his scientific ambitions and his record of small successes. He recalls the great men who taught or inspired him: Helmholtz, Hertz, Maxwell, Planck, and above all Paul Drude, whose life and mind exemplified the classical virtues of proportion, harmony, and grace that Jakob reveres. In Drude's shocking and unexpected suicide, we see reflected Jakob's own bewilderment and loss of bearings as his once secure world comes to an end in the horrors of the war and in the cultural fragmentation wrought by twentieth-century modernism. His attempt to come to terms with himself, with his life in science, and with his spiritual legacy will affect deeply everyone who cares about the fragile structures of civilization that must fall before the onrush of progress.