Skylight Books and Writers Bloc Present
Karl Ove Knausgaard with Brandon Taylor
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
6:00pm PT
Paid Livestream
Price: $30 – $33.75. Ticket price includes a copy of The Morning Star and access to the virtual event.
Contact Skylight Books via Eventbrite to request a refund. Eventbrite’s fee is nonrefundable.
PLEASE NOTE: This conversation will be prerecorded. To submit questions for the author, please email Skylight at events@skylightbooks.com by Wednesday, September 22nd at 5pm PT.
A limited number of signed copies are available, while supplies last.
Karl Ove Knausgaard became a literary sensation for his fictionalized series about himself, called My Struggle. The series hit bestseller lists all over the world, not just because he wrote six installments, or volumes, in one year. The New Yorker’s interview with Knausgaard illuminates more about the literary impact My Struggle had on readers and critics. We are proud to present Karle Ove Knausgaard for his new release, The Morning Star, in a joint program with Skylight Books.
The Morning Star (Penguin Press)
Translated by Martin Aitken
A major new work from the author of the renowned My Struggle series, The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don’t understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless
It’s a normal night in August. Literature professor Arne and artist Tove are with their children at the resort in Sørlandet. Their friend, Egil, a driver by day, is staying in a cabin nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is on her way home from a seminar, the journalist Jostein is out on the town, and his wife Turid, who is an assistant nurse, has a night shift. Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears in the sky. No one, not even the astronomers, knows for sure what kind of phenomenon it is. Is there a star burning itself out? Why then has no one seen it before? Or is it a brand new star? Slowly the interest in the news subsides, and life goes on, but not quite as before, for unusual phenomena begin to occur on the fringes of human existence. Over these days in August, the characters the novel follows will each understand what is happening differently, and all face new struggles in their own lives.
The Morning Star is a novel about what we do not understand, about great drama seen through the limited lens of little lives. But first and foremost, it is a novel about what happens when the dark forces in the world are set free.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it has appeared, and the first volume was awarded the prestigious Brage Prize.
In conversation with Brandon Taylor. Taylor is an acclaimed novelist and essayist, whose novel, Real Life, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as well as nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize, among others. The New York Times included Real Life on its 100 Notable Books of 2020. His writing appears in many magazines and journals.
