Septology - Paperback

by Jon Fosse (Author), Damion Searls (Translator)

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

2022 International Booker Prize, Finalist
2022 National Book Award, Finalist
2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist
New York Times Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Bookforum

Selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bj rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. The three volumes of Jon Fosse's Septology--The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name--collected in for the first time in this limited hardcover edition, are a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience--incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

Author Biography

Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children's books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.