Autumn

Simone Weil wrote that 'attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer' - and so it is here. Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard's patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted...This book is full of wonders. - The New York Times In these secular meditations, Knausgaard scratches away at the ordinary to reach the sublime - finding what's in the picture, and what's hidden. - Washington Post Even more than in My Struggle, he seems to inhabit every age simultaneously: He is boy, adolescent, and father at once.... If hard truths insist on hiding in the deep, these essays suggest, a hand-line will do as well as a drift net to haul them in.- The Boston Globe In his new book, Autumn , the first in a seasonal quartet, Knausgaard casts his gaze outward, crafting a lyrical collage of mini essays and letters to his unborn daughter. - O Magazine The most surprising thing about Autumn , the latest book from Norwegian literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, is how tender it is. . . The spirit of that love animates this gentle, thoughtful book: love both for Knausgaard's unborn daughter and for finding elements of the transcendent in the mundane. It's tender, intimate, and lovely. - Vox The joys of one of the world's great living writers distilled.- GQ.com With a Nordic half-wink of self-parody. No one dotes on details like Knausgaard.- Vulture.com Knausgaard is an acute, sometimes squirmingly honest analyst of domesticity and his relationship to his family. . ....he figures it out with the sharp radiance that is his gift. - Newsweek Knausgaard can take the breath away, his compressed vignettes delivering the same emotional charge as longer sequences from his previous work. . . this first volume of the Seasons Quartet quietly illuminates Knausgaard's profound gift for making the reader see the world in fresh and unpredictable ways.- The Guardian Summer ends with one of the sweetest reading surprises of the year...unexpected, tender, intense, and persuasive...I encourage you to spend your autumn reading it. - The Philadelphia Inquirer Yes, this guy writes a ton. His massive, multivolume autobiography My Struggle is regarded as variously notorious or brilliant. But what a sweet, surprising, short collection of essays this is! Lie on the beach, sun beating down, and read about the season to come. - Philadelphia Tribune The great pleasure of Autumn is in watching how Knausgaard starts in commonplace observations - 'of all the things we do, pissing is one of the most routine' - but then moves unexpectedly toward surprising conclusions. . . I'll look forward to Winter, Spring and Summer. - San Francisco Chronicle For those seeking. . . a moment of contemplative peace, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard's new book will help...Knausgaard admires Madame Bovary above all other novels, saying Flaubert's sentences 'are like a rag rubbed across a windowpane encrusted with smoke and dirt which you have long since grown accustomed to seeing the world through.' Autumn performs the same task. - Toronto Star What truly unites these pieces is Knausgaard's sensibility, which is one part Montaigne (an urge to address big issues), one part Nicholson Baker (an eye for picayune detail), and one part Annie Dillard (an admiration for nature and an elegant prose style)... A call to pay closer attention to the routine stuff in our lives and to allow ourselves to be thunderstruck by their beauty. - Kirkus Reviews (starred) Novelist Knausgaard ( My Struggle ) eloquently expresses the delights, rewards, and insights of looking closely in this, the first of a projected quartet of autobiographical volumes based on the four seasons. ...His writing encourages the reader to see the connections between quotidian things and the bigger picture and to appreciate both continuity and change. Autumn hums in the backgrou