OUR BOOKS

Dear Knausgaard

Kim Adrian

Kim Adrian’s loving struggle with Knausgaard is the kind of criticism I most enjoy – personal, wonderfully engaged, intense but somehow simultaneously light-footed, and extremely intelligent. The brilliance of her feminist critique is that it acutely exposes vulnerabilities in Knausgaard’s male universalism while affectionately acknowledging the scope and appeal of his inevitably gendered voice. A delight from start to finish.’

James Wood, literary critic

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In a series of personal letters, Dear Knausgaard sets forth a searing feminist critique of My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. What starts out as an engaging response to a work of literature that has become genre-defining, later morphs into a compelling and necessary interrogation of the social and cultural forces behind Knausgaard’s work. Throughout, Adrian provides us with fertile ground for a celebration of the act of reading itself.

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‘Kim Adrian’s Dear Knausgaard isn’t just for everyone who reveled in or fought with My Struggle, it’s for everyone who reads—period, everyone who struggles with the profoundly complicated act of engaging with another mind. It is both a love letter to Knausgaard and a feminist critique of his work, a celebration and deconstruction of the act of close reading, and a meta-commentary on the relationship between writer and reader. Smart, funny, intimate, and erudite, this marvelous book is a powerful argument for the potential of reading to change us, to alter the trajectory of our lives.’

Peter Grandbois, author of Nahoonkara (Etruscan Press, 2011)

Dear Knausgaard brings together two notions of what it means to be good, two kinds of writerly indulgence, two versions of the casualness and self-attentiveness of our era. In these imaginary letters, Kim Adrian faces down her hero and unwitting oppressor, a man whose novels have helped her see the world anew, but whose blind spots give pain and spark anger. Adrian’s crushing honesty, her unusual forbearance: these make the book a moving and intimate one. Her long attachment to My Struggle makes the critique an essential read.’

William Pierce, author of Reality Hunger: on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016)

Paperback | £10.00 (RRP: £12.99)
ISBN 978-1-913861-38-4