Join Adam Dalva and Brandon Taylor to discuss the life and work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, in celebration of The Third Realm. 

Adam and Brandon are best friends who talk about books all the time, but this Friday we are lucky enough to be part of their conversation. Expect illuminating debate on nothing less than life’s biggest questions: why are we here, and what do we do now?

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From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us. 

“Intense. . . A clarifying continuation, packed with philosophy, terror, and the beauty of the mundane.” —Publishers Weekly

For several days, a strange and bright new star in the sky above Norway has sown an unyielding sense of foreboding, of agitation, and of fear. Tove, a painter on holiday with her family, has spiraled into a psychosis that stirs her into a flurry of unbridled creativity. Geir, a policeman who has been investigating a grisly triple murder, comes to a sinister revelation he must keep to himself. Nineteen-year-old Line falls in love with the lead singer of a metal band and is lured into a secret and frightening world.

But most bewildering, and disquieting, is the discovery made by Syvert, an undertaker: since the star has appeared, no one has died.

In The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard returns to the spellbinding world of The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, as a cast of new and familiar characters continue to reckon with the meaning of this star. What is haunting them, and why?

As supernatural forces collide with the mundanities of everyday, and the threshold between life and death becomes diffuse, people are forced to live their lives as before while the world around them slowly changes in inexplicable ways. Piercing through human existence into the bestial and phantasmagorical, Knausgaard flings opens the gates to our most distressing neuroses and forces us to ask: What happens if the dark forces in the world are set free?

Please note: Karl Ove Knausgaard will not be in attendance. 

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Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. He is a Contributing Fiction Editor of the Yale Review and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Adam is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.

 

 

 

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

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