Hunger

by Knut Hamsun, Tore Rem, Terence Cave

Overview

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 others on the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192677358
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Series:	Oxford World's Classics Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Knut Hamsun (1858–1952) was a Norwegian novelist, poet, and playwright hailed by many as one of the founders of modern literature. Born to a poor peasant family in central Norway, he worked as a schoolmaster, sheriff’s assistant, laborer, store clerk, farmhand, and streetcar conductor in both Scandinavia and America before establishing himself as a successful playwright and novelist. His first novel, Hunger (1890), was an immediate critical success; he went on to write the novels Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), Victoria (1898), and The Growth of the Soil (1917), the last of which earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

Sverre Lyngstad (1922–2011; translator, introducer, notes) was a scholar and translator of Norwegian literature and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He translated five of Knut Hamsun’s works for Penguin Classics—Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), Victoria (1898), and The Growth of the Soil (1917)—and was honored by the King of Norway with the St. Olav Medal and with the Knight’s Cross, First Class, of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit.

Table of Contents

IntroductionNote on the TranslationSelect BibliographyA Chronology of Knut HamsunHungerExplanatory Notes

Editorial Reviews

After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists.

Detroit News James Goldwasser

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“Knut Hamsun’s writing is magical, his sentences are glowing, he could write about anything and make it alive.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New York Times Book Review

 “The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer

 “The classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoyevsky . . . Lyngstad’s translation restores to the English-speaking reader one of the cold summits in modern prose literature.” —George Steiner

From the Publisher

Disturbing and difficult as this nightmarish novel is, it is a work of imaginative brilliance that resonates in our own day

Herald

Hamsun has the qualities that belong to the very great, a complete omniscience on human nature

Rebecca West

Hunger was published in 1890 and its power has not faded

London Review of Books

One of the most disturbing novels in existence

Time Out

Hunger is the crux of Hamsun's claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky

Observer

Hunger is undoubtedly one of the most important novels of the modern age. At last it has found a translator capable of doing justice to its immense power and complexity: Lyngstad's deserves to become the standard English version

Duncan McClean

An excellent new translation . . . this Hunger deserves to be the standard English version

Times Literary Supplement