A Shining - by Jon Fosse (Paperback)

About the Book

"A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde)."--

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A New Yorker Best Book of 2023

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, "the Beckett of the twenty-first century" (Le Monde).

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR A SHINING

"Fosse follows up the voluminous Septology with the hypnotic story of a man lost in remote Norwegian woods... Fosse fans will savor this assured monologue of ethereal events." -Publishers Weekly

"Fosse's prose frequently plays with the absurd, blurring the line between the imagined and the real. A Shining explores this haze as its protagonist's mind makes a slow, Dantean descent into the void." --World Literature Today

"When think of my own death, I will forever see Fosse's dark woods and his shining, barefoot apparitions in snow-smothered quiet. I don't know how to speak of this brief book without reverence or animal fear. A book to be read aloud, around a campfire, with loved ones, in its entirety."--Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

"Fosse writes of a world in which language is finally dislocated from a reality that it is no longer capable of describing. Stripped of its habituated meaning, language becomes elemental: characters are as endangered by language as from exposure or injury, even as oceanic swells of memory, awe, and obsession grant them the power to conjure the dead or transcend the silent mire of the apparent world. A Shining is incandescent horror, uniting the lyrical surreality of Samuel Beckett, the obsessive rhythms of Thomas Bernhard, and a secret third ingredient that negates any possibility of comparison. A novella for the bewildered angel in every reader. "--Reagan Briere, Gibson's Bookstore (Concord, NH)

"Reading Fosse could be likened to Rothko's colored bands of light or maybe something like the cello of Pablo Casals."--David Gruber, Greenlight Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

PRAISE FOR JON FOSSE

"Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: 'It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.' None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? 'He is the most destructive writer I know, ' Fosse claims. 'I feel that there's a kind of--I don't know if it's a good English word--but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.'"--Merve Emre, The New Yorker

"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 books feel like the culminating project of an already major career."--Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times

"With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and--it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century--different from what has been written before. Septology feels new."--Wyatt Mason, Harper's

"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

"In The Other Name's

About the Author

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.