Of Darkness - by Josefine Klougart (Paperback)

About the Book

Klougart mixes prose, lyric essay, drama, poetry, and images to meditate on death and loss through breathtaking, moving, apocalyptic writing.

Book Synopsis

"Klougart has an unusual ability to create phrases, images and a language that you long to stay in and remember forever."--Dagens Nyheter

"One can speak of unbearable beauty, but one can also speak of a linguistic beauty that makes it possible to bear the unbearable."--Politiken

In this genre-bending apocalyptic novel Josefine Klougart fuses myriad literary styles to breathtaking effect in poetic meditations on life and death interspersed with haunting imagery. Her experimental novel asks readers to reconsider death, asserting sorrow and loss as beautiful and necessary aspects of living.

Hailed as "the Virginia Woolf of Scandinavia," Klougart mixes prose, lyric essay, drama, poetry, and images to breathtaking effect in her writing, and Of Darkness marks the arrival of a wholly new literary talent in world literature.

Josefine Klougart (b. 1985) made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Rise and Fall, which was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her third novel, One of Us is Sleeping, forthcoming from Open Letter Books in summer 2016, was also nominated for a Nordic Council Literature Prize, making her the youngest author ever nominated twice for this prominent prize. Her fourth and most recent novel, Of Darkness, appeared in Denmark in 2014 to universal critical acclaim and became a massive bestseller in Denmark and Norway.

Translator Martin Aitken has won numerous awards for his translations of Danish literature, and he is currently working with Karl Ove Knausgaard to translate the final volume of My Struggle and his nonfiction.

Review Quotes

"A critically acclaimed young voice in current Scandanavian Literature, Klougart...writes beautifully... Of Darkness is a meditative look at loss, love, pain, living, and mortality." -Daniel Haeusser

"A fragmentary meditation on death and decay, Of Darkness by Josefine Klougart stretches the concept of fictional narrative to its very limits. She redefines the novel in the process." --Karl Wolff, NY Journal of Books

About the Author

Josefine Klougart is considered one of the major voices of contemporary Scandinavian literature, hailed as "one of the most important writers, not just of her generation, but of her time." Klougart's debut novel, Rise and Fall, and her third novel, One of Us Is Sleeping, both received Nordic Council Literature Prize nominations, making her the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for Scandinavia's most prestigious award. One of Us is Sleeping was published in its English translation by Open Letter Books in 2016. Her fourth novel, Of Darkness, appeared in 2014 to massive critical acclaim throughout Scandinavia, and will be published in English by Deep Vellum in early 2017.

Martin Aitken is an award-winning translator of Danish literature. His work includes novels by such authors such as Peter Høeg, Helle Helle, Pia Juul, and Kim Leine, and he has been awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize, and was longlisted for both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is currently translating from the Norwegian of the sixth book in Karl Ove Knausgaard's highly acclaimed My Struggle sextology.