Best Selling Books by Jon Fosse

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes''s father''s thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes''s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 Trilogy is Jon Fosse’s critically acclaimed, luminous love story about Asle and Alida, two lovers trying to find their place in this world. Homeless and sleepless, they wander around Bergen in the rain, trying to make a life for themselves and the child they expect. Through a rich web of historical, cultural, and theological allusions, Fosse constructs a modern parable of injustice, resistance, crime, and redemption. Consisting of three novellas (Wakefulness, Olav’s Dreams, and Weariness), Trilogy is a haunting, mysterious, and poignant evocation of love, for which Fosse received The Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature in 2015.

"In these three seasonal plays Jon Fosse explores the crossover between the poetic and the everyday, as ordinary encounters become pivotal moments in the lives of his characters. Past and present overlap in A Summer''s Day, as an elderly widow remembers the day, many years before, when her husband went out to sea and never returned. In a series of continuous but chronologically distinct scenes, Dream of Autumn charts a surprising relationship between a man and an old female friend he encounters: she becomes his second wife and causes him to fall out with his family. In Winter, a fascinating but mercurial woman tries to seduce a businessman, but after giving up his marriage and career for her, he discovers he may have mistaken her intentions. In each of these plays, Fosse''s unique use of fractured and repetitive speech rhythms imbues apparently mundane situations with a hypnotic intensity."--BOOK JACKET.

They have a child and life changes. He can''t go out and she can''t stay in. He writes words that no one will publish and she takes a lover. "I don''t know what it is/ that always make something happen/ But it must be something/ because something always happens/ I don''t want anything to happen/ and then something/ happens all the same."

Includes the plays And We''ll Never be Parted, The Son, Visits and Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black In And We''ll Never be Parted, Jon Fosse exploits theatre''s unique potential for ambiguity: as a woman anxiously waits for her husband, are we watching reality, fantasy, memory, or even a ghost story? The Son concerns an ageing and isolated couple, whose long-absent son has a score to settle with their meddlesome neighbour.In the oblique but psychologically penetrating Visits, a withdrawn teenager, apparently upset by the attentions of her mother''s boyfriend, turns to her brother for help. The short play Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black, exploring the dilemmas of an errant husband, his young lover and his family, displays Fosse''s characteristic compression of theatrical time and space at its most concentrated.

The celebrated Norwegian novelist’s magnum opus, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, published in one volume for the first time. 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 Bjørgvin, 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. Jon Fosse’s Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic and utterly unique. ‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’ – Karl Ove Knausgaard ‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’ – Le Monde ‘An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself…the culminating project of an already major career.’ – Randy Boyagoda, New York Times ‘A major work of Scandinavian fiction …Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths.’ – Hari Kunzru ‘I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’ – Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books

A haunting collection from one of Norway''s most celebrated writers.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse features an unnamed narrator who leads a hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Part stream-of-consciousness metafictive exercise, part gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle to reveal a tale of jealousy and betrayal.

A young man lives alone with his mother and his beloved dog in a house in a small village overlooking the fjord. The dog has run off and gone missing. This has never happened before... In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the direction of their future. Fosse''s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters'' relationships.

An elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, from the author of Scenes from a Childhood.

A new volume of plays from one of the leading Norwegian writers.

The essential lecture delivered by the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Literature, published for the first time in a collectible edition. "If there''s any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening," says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity, and existential uncertainty of the human experience. "It is only in the silence that you can hear God''s voice," he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. "Maybe."

Jon Fosse has been called ''the Beckett of the 21st century'' (Le Monde), and the Royal Court production of Nightsongs was dubbed ''Waiting for Godot without the gags''. Just as Beckett''s plays - and those of all great playwrights - grew out of their time, and influenced the current styles of drama, and were part of what brought their times forward, so do Fosse''s plays now. Fosse: Plays Six marks the culmination of this Norwegian playwright''s body of work for the stage to be published in the English language. The volume includes the plays Rambuku, Freedom, Over There, These Eyes, Girl in Yellow Raincoat, Christmas Tree Song and Sea. Rambuku: Two people. One finds it difficult to speak. The other attempts to understand. But what is Rambuku? Or who is Rambuku? Freedom: There is a sense of otherness in Fosse''s work that challenges our notions of a concept such as ''freedom''. This play questions if freedom, as we often understand it, is perhaps a prison. Over There: A woman follows a man to his death. But do they see the same images on the way to the top of the mountain? These Eyes: A snapshot of the dreamlike state of life. The characters exist in an in-between space which becomes their reality. Girl in Yellow Raincoat: An examination of our collective weakness, and the fragility of children. It asks questions about notions surrounding fear. Christmas Tree Song: A man celebrates Christmas alone (and reflects in a somewhat ironic way) on his life as he attempts to put up a Christmas tree. Sea: A group of people gathered in a kind of limbo, on a ship, disappearing into something unknown.

The wind gathers, rising up suddenly. Two men on a fragile boat, a trip to sea – a few drinks, a bite to eat – when one of them decides to push on to the open ocean. Suddenly there they are: among the distant islands, the threatening fog and gathering swell of the sea, bound together on an odyssey into the unknown. Jon Fosse’s work includes novels, poetry, essays and books for children. He is one of the most produced playwrights in Europe and his plays have been translated into forty languages. Oberon Books publishes Nightsongs and The Girl on the Sofa, and his other plays in the following collections: Plays One, Plays Two, Plays Three, Plays Four and Plays Five. Plays Six is forthcoming in 2012. Oberon Books also publishes The Luminous Darkness: The Theatre of Jon Fosse by Leif Zern (translated by Ann Henning-Jocelyn).

The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer''s three-volumeSeptology.

Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse, ''the Beckett of the twenty-first century'' (Le Monde).

Includes the plays Someone is Going to Come, The Guitar Man, The Name and The Child In Someone is Going to Come the two of them want to be together, just the two of them, so they leave the city and buy a remote house by the sea. But is it possible to do what they want to do? Won''t somebody come? Surely someone will come. The Guitar Man is a poignant monologue in which a busker sings songs to an audience that is always on the move, always passing him by. The Name (winner of the Ibsen Prize in Norway) tells the story of an estranged family forced to live under one roof. When a pregnant girl and the father of the child have nowhere to live, they move into her parents'' house. But the parents have never met the father-to-be, and don''t yet know about the pregnancy. In The Child a man and a woman find each other in a bus stop on a rainy night. They hold each other close. They rent an old house out of town. The woman becomes pregnant. But the child is too small to survive. In these four varied plays Jon Fosse''s unique linguistic style, at once poetic and naturalistic, magnifies the love and pain of ordinary people seeking to live their lives. Cast sizes: 3,6,1,6

A haunting exploration of love and loss by the Beckett of the twenty-first century (Le Monde).

1853. Il giovane pittore Lars Hertervig, allievo all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Düsseldorf, è un’anima irrequieta, divisa tra l’insicurezza verso il suo talento e l’amore per Helene Winckelmann, la figlia della sua padrona di casa. L’ossessione di Lars per Helene, accesa da furiosi deliri sessuali, diventa così strabordante da costringere la famiglia della ragazza ad allontanarlo dalla stanza in cui alloggia. Senza più un posto dove andare, Hertervig passa il tempo in un locale, tra gli scherni dei suoi raffinati compagni di corso, mentre fa la posta all’appartamento dei Winckelmann dove cerca disperatamente di essere riammesso. Un limbo che, inesorabilmente, lo conduce alla follia, in un labirinto della mente a cui soltanto la sorella maggiore, Oline, può avere accesso. 1991. Uno scrittore trentenne, Vidme, resta affascinato da un quadro di Hertervig e vuole raccontarlo in un romanzo. Ma i tormenti di quel pittore attraversano i secoli e arrivano sulla pagina di Vidme, che dovrà combattere, per scrivere il libro, anche contro i propri fantasmi. Jon Fosse cattura la luce e le ombre che illuminano le anime di due uomini lontani nel tempo. Il risultato è un romanzo immaginifico, selvaggio e intenso come il cielo del Nord, con una scrittura musicale che racconta la perdizione dell’arte e la forza di sentimenti irrefrenabili. “Jon Fosse dà voce all’indicibile.” Dalla motivazione del premio Nobel per la Letteratura 2023 “Fosse è stato paragonato a Ibsen e a Beckett,ma è molto di più. Per una ragione: la sua intensa, poetica semplicità.” The New York Times “L’opera di Fosse è un enigma che restituisce vita e speranza a chi la legge. Illumina l’anima umana come sanno fare solo gli eletti.”Manuel Vilas

Slim, mournful tale of loss and memory in a coastal Norwegian town, first published in Norway in 2003. The novel opens with a series of shifts in perspective, time and identity that hint at the experimentation that follows. We immediately meet Signe, an aging woman living alone near a fjord. The story is set in 2002, but Signe is soon thinking back to 1979 and the day her husband, Asle, died while boating in the waters.

"A postmodern poet who successfully employed classic structures to exploit the range of possibilities inherent in the Slovenian language, this selection from the life''s work of Milan Jesih highlights his revolutionary approach to verse. Beginning with humor and autobiography and gradually withdrawing into a universe of fragments, quotations, dreams, and doubt, this collection offers English readers a first glimpse into the work of one of Slovenia''s literary treasures" --

A girl sits on a sofa, not knowing what to do with herself. She argues with her mother and envies her older sister. She also longs for her absent father, a seaman. A middle-aged woman paints a portrait of herself as a young girl, sitting on a sofa, but she''s beginning to doubt her artistic ability. Still at odds with her sister and her mother and haunted by her dead father, she''s unable to shake the continuing presence of the past in her life... Jon Fosse''s new play, and this English version by David Harrower, were commissioned by the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

Not so much a sequel as an alternate perspective, Jon Fosse’s coda to his brilliant and much-lauded Melancholy, picks up the story of tormented landscape painter Lars Hertervig in 1902, shortly after his death. In the same meticulous and hypnotic prose for which Fosse is famous, Melancholy II serves not only as an investigation into the “collateral damage” of art, but into a master’s tools and obsessions. Taking place, like Melancholy, over the course of a single day, we are treated to the thoughts of Hertervig’s sister Oline, carrying on with her life in the absence of her beloved—if eccentric—brother. She recalls their childhood under a domineering father, recalls Hertervig’s difficulties fitting in, and likewise Hertervig the man: poor, always hovering on the brink, fanatical about painting and his own perceived shortcomings both as an artist and human being. In the same meticulous and hypnotic prose for which Fosse is famous, Melancholy II serves not only as an investigation into the “collateral damage” of art, but into a master’s tools and obsessions.

Melancholy I-II is a fictional invocation of the nineteenth-century Norwegian artist Lars Hertervig, who painted luminous landscapes, suffered mental illness and died poor in 1902. In this wild, feverish narrative, Jon Fosse delves into Hertervig''s mind as the events of one day precipitate his mental breakdown. A student of Hans Gude at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Hertervig is paralyzed by anxieties about his talent and is overcome with love for Helene Winckelmann, his landlady''s daughter. Marked by inspiring lyrical flights of passion and enraged sexual delusions, Hertervig''s fixation on Helene persuades her family that he must leave. Oppressed by hallucinations and with nowhere to go, Hertervig shuttles between a cafe, where he endures the mockery of his more sophisticated classmates, and the Winckelmann''s apartment, which he desperately tries to re-enter - a limbo state which leads him inexorably into a state of madness. Published here in one volume in English for the first time, Melancholy I-II is a major novel by ''the Beckett of the twenty-first century'' (Le Monde).

Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, A Red Butterfly''s Wings, Warm, Telemakos and SleepIn their different ways, these plays are existential suspense stories, centred around a common concept of time. The past is recreated through present moments, the future hinted at through shared memories, yet experienced from different perspectives. Fosse''s drama explores life lived in unexpected ways, with a sense of otherness pervading the present and colouring the characters'' relationships.The whole life of Suzannah Ibsen unfolds as she waits for her playwriting husband to come home. In Sleep, one day captures the lives of a young woman and a young man as they grow into middle-age and old age. Living Secretly asks questions about how to live with and open up to one''s actions through sequences of time. In The Dead Dogs, lives are shockingly disrupted by an event that changes the directions of their future. Warm''s characters move back and forth through time to capture past images and actions, in an effort to make sense of the present. Telemakos reinvents an old classic from a contemporary point of view. Fosse''s damatic voice is full of poetic intensity, yet wryly ironic, and with a sense of the comedy of the human condition. Includes the plays Suzannah, Living Secretly, The Dead Dogs, Telemakos, Sleep and A Red Butterfly s Wings.

Written in melodious and hypnotic ''slow prose'', A New Name, the final volume in Jon Fosse''s Septology, is a transcendent exploration of the human condition by Jon Fosse, and a radically other reading experience - incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.