Jon Fosse
The Norwegian novelist, playwright, and poet Jon Fosse has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. A literary celebrity in his native country, he is the author of more than 40 plays, essay collections, short stories, and the internationally acclaimed prose sequence Septology.
Septology was released in the US as a special single-edition in 2022; in the UK it has been published in three parts by Fitzcarraldo. A new novel, A Shining, was released in English in fall 2023. As the critic Merve Emre has written: “One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence.”
Books by Jon Fosse
“Look out for the new book from Jon Fosse, A Shining, which will be released 31 October in the US and 1 November in the UK. It’s a surreal, dreamlike sequence set in the Norwegian woods, in which the narrator’s car becomes stuck in a rut on a remote track. Like his remarkable Septology, which floored me last year, the English translation is by the US writer Damian Searls—who learned Norwegian specifically to translate Fosse.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“I might stretching it a little to describe Jon Fosse’s monumental stream-of-consciousness sequence Septology as a ‘2022 novel’, but 2022 has certainly been the Year of Septology. It’s a challenging read, in much the same way that Lucy Ellman’s thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport was challenging, but it’s worth your time and attention. Surrender yourself into the void that is Septology.“ Read more...
Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“The Septology as a whole, and A New Name in particular, is an extraordinary meditation on art and love, and the possibility of eternity. Each of the individual sections in the book is a single sentence. Those sentences have an incantatory feel to them. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated images, repeated sections. It has an extraordinary hypnotic quality. Frequently, the reader will shift from being inside the mind of character A to character B and it will take a moment before you realise it, but that’s entirely deliberate. The prose is luminous. It’s like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction. You aren’t trying to. You have no frame of reference as to where you are. You are simply here, and must deal with the waves as they come. It’s a reading experience unlike anything else I’ve come across in the last several years, and an extraordinary meditation on human mortality and human endeavour, what we do with our lives, what we don’t do, what we may regret, what we may invest ourselves in—in terms of our art or whatever it is.” Read more...
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Frank Wynne, Translator
Interviews where books by Jon Fosse were recommended
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1
Tomb of Sand
by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell -
2
Cursed Bunny
by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur -
3
A New Name: Septology VI-VII
by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls -
4
Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd -
5
The Books of Jacob: A Novel
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft -
6
Elena Knows
by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Frank Wynne
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Frank Wynne
The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne, acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.
Editor’s Choice: Our 2022 Novels of the Year, recommended by Cal Flyn
Author and Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn highlights her favourite novels of 2022—from Jennifer Egan’s highly anticipated follow-up to the multi-award-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad, to a debut novel by a twenty-something writer who gave voice to cancer, literally.
Notable Novels of Fall 2023, recommended by Cal Flyn
Outside it’s autumnal and the nights are drawing in. All the better for admiring the bright lights of publishing’s starriest season, when the shiniest baubles are released in time for the Christmas rush. Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most notable new novels of Fall 2023, including eagerly-awaited books from Zadie Smith and Jesmyn Ward, plus the buzziest new releases in literary fiction and novels-in-translation
