'It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them...' Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and...

'When the snow water had broken crevices open in the mountain a shot or even just a sharp cry was enough to tear loose a huge slab and send it toppling.' Lieutenant Thomas Glahn spends a summer in northern Norway, where the midnight sun triggers a short but intense release of energies. Living out of a rudimentary hut on the edge of the forest, he pursues a solitary existence, hunting, fishing, and engaging intermittently with the inhabitants of the nearby coastal village. ...

Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modern Drama', came from a seemingly inauspicious background. What are the key contexts for understanding his appearance on the world stage? This collection provides thirty contributions from leading scholars in theatre studies, literary studies, book history, philosophy, music, and history, offering a rich interdisciplinary understanding of Ibsen's work, with chapters ranging across cultural and aesthetic contexts including feminism, scientific discovery, genr...

Henrik Ibsen's drama is the most prominent and lasting contribution of the cultural surge seen in Scandinavian literature in the later nineteenth century. When he made his debut in Norway in 1850, the nation's literary presence was negligible, yet by 1890 Ibsen had become one of Europe's most famous authors. Contrary to the standard narrative of his move from restrictive provincial origins to liberating European exile, Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem show how Ibsen's trajectory was preconditione...

A Doll's House/Ghosts/Pillars of the Community/An Enemy of the People'Our home has never been anything other than a play-house. I've been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Daddy's doll-child'These four plays established Ibsen as the leading figure in the theatre of his day, sending shockwaves throughout Europe and beyond. A Doll's House scandalized audiences with its free-thinking heroine Nora. Ibsen's even more radical follow-up, Ghos...

Ibsen's greatest late plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series.This volume includes The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken - Ibsen's last four plays, written in his old age in Oslo. In The Master Builder, a married, middle-aged architect becomes bewitched by a strange young woman who claims to have known him for years. A sudden death in Little E...

Four of Ibsen's most important plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series.In these four unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the complex nature of truth, the tension between freedom and responsibility, and the terrible pull that the past exerts over the present. In The Wild Duck, an idealist destroys a family by exposing the lie behind his friend's marriage. In Rosmersholm, a respectable man is driven t...

A new Penguin edition of Ibsen's two great verse plays, in masterful versions by one of our greatest living poets, Geoffrey Hill.These two powerful and contrasting verse dramas by Ibsen made his reputation as a playwright. The fantastical adventures of the irrepressible Peer Gynt - poet, idler, procrastinator, seducer - draw on Norwegian folklore to conjure up mountains, kidnappings, shipwrecks and trolls in an exuberant examination of truth and the self; while

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookke...

INTRODUCTION BY JO NESBØAFTERWORD BY PAUL AUSTERNineteenth-century Kristiania is an unforgiving place, and work is thin on the ground. Roaming the streets of Norway's capital, a penniless young writer searches for inspiration whilst trying desperately to make ends meet. Driven to extraordinary lengths, sleeping under the stars with his stomach growling, the writer's behaviour becomes increasingly irrational and his world spirals into chaos.

A modernist masterpiece: the Nobel Prize winner’s first and most important novelFirst published in Norway in 1890, Hunger probes the depths of consciousness with frightening and gripping power. Contemptuous of novels of his time and what he saw as their stereotypical plots and empty characters, Knut Hamsun embarked on “an attempt to describe the strange, peculiar life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a starving body.” Like the works of Dostoyevs...

The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling a...