LitHouse podcast
91 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsLitHouse is the English language podcast from the House of Literature (Litteraturhuset) in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international writers and thinkers.
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Episodes
Hidden in the Details: Adania Shibli and Maaza Mengiste
March 31, 2024 05:00 - 1 hour - 158 MBThe year is 1949, and the state of Israel is in its infancy. In the Negev desert, bordering Egypt, Israeli armed forces have set up camp with the mission to “cleanse it of any remaining Arabs” after the war the preceding year. They happen upon a Beduin family, a teenage girl among them, whom the soldiers rape, kill and bury in the desert. In present-day Ramallah, a young woman discovers these events through a small newspaper story. It catches her attention because the events took place exac...
Censorship in East and West. Ian Buruma and Helge Jordheim
January 07, 2024 06:00 - 1 hour - 141 MBFreedom of expression is never absolute, but subject to laws and social conventions. Threats to freedom of thought and speech can come directly from authoritarian states or religious institutions. But they can also be self-inflicted, in the form of self-censorship. Both forms of censorship exist in democracies as well as dictatorship, and often overlap. Throughout history, authors in particular have been made the object of the limitations set by powerful institutions, be it by explicit decr...
An Ode to Boyhood and Rage. Max Porter and Mattis Øybø
November 12, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour - 138 MBThe year is 1995, and 16 year old Shy is sneaking out of the rural boarding school for “difficult” boys, named “Last Chance”. A long history of petty crime, expulsions and frustrated family members has brought him here, but now it is all soon over. With a spliff in his pocket and his Walkman loaded with his drum ‘n’ bass favourites, he’s ready. His rucksack is filled with rocks, and his head is swimming with memories of all his failures and times he fucked it up. Shy is a compositionally am...
A Chorus of Voices from Vietnam. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Yukiko Duke
October 22, 2023 05:00 - 52 minutes - 121 MBDo you understand why I’ve decided to tell you about our family? If our stories survive, we will not die, even when our bodies are no longer here on this earth. The Vietnam war was a watershed event in the Cold War as well as in the West’s understanding of itself. But what does the story look like from a Vietnamese perspective? In Vietnam, the war is still a traumatic experience. This is what writer Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai explores in her novel The Mountains Sing, in which we alternately follo...
A Love without Bounds. Aleksandar Hemon and John Freeman
October 08, 2023 05:00 - 51 minutes - 117 MBIn some other world, in some other life, Pinto might’ve prayed in the morning, prayed his šaharit, prayed to be relieved of his abhorrent passion. But the only prayer that came to his mind now was to the Lord to let him keep Osman for the rest of time, for his voice to be the last thing he would hear before slipping into la gran eskuridad. Rafael Pinto is a young Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with big dreams and a penchant for opium. One summer day in 1914 he witnesses the assassi...
Traitor or war hero? Ian Buruma and Marte Michelet
October 01, 2023 05:00 - 49 minutes - 114 MBA masseuse who rises in the ranks to become Himmler’s confidant. A cross-dressing princess who spies for Japanese secret police in China. A Dutch Jew who personally hands over his friends to the Nazis and the gas chambers. The Collaborators is the story of three most unusual lives, all of whom served the other side during World War II. But it is also the story of their legacies and the ways in which the writing of history can become the falsification of history: The Dutchman and the spy wer...
All Animals Are Not Equal. NoViolet Bulawayo and Priya Bains
September 24, 2023 05:00 - 52 minutes - 120 MBIn the novel Glory, we find ourselves in the fictional country Jidada, which is peopled with all kinds of animals; bleating sheep, a confident pig preacher, vicious dogs making up the country’s security forces, and at the very top: the Old Horse, who has ruled the country with an iron hoof ever since independence. He is «the longest-serving leader in a continent of long-serving leaders, and indeed in the whole wide world». Author NoViolet Bulawayo has drawn inspiration both from George Orwe...
The Writer as Witness. Joyce Carol Oates and Karin Haugen
September 02, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour - 171 MBJoyce Carol Oates is one of the world’s greatest living writers, and is frequently cited as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. It is truly a momentous occasion that Oates will visit the House of Literature, and in doing so will be visiting Norway for the very first time. Through more than one hundred books spanning most genres, the American legend writes tenderly and with precision about our societies’ great questions. «The opposite of language is silence and silence for human ...
A Quiet Revolution. Abdulrazak Gurnah and Leila Aboulela
August 29, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour - 144 MBIn 2021, Abdulrazak Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African-born writer to receive the award in close to 20 years. The Swedish Academy awarded Gurnah the prize «for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents». Across the world, more and more readers are discovering Gurnah’s body of work. His novels Paradise, Afterlives and Desertion explore the history of ...
What Should Art Be? Lecture by Joyce Carol Oates
August 26, 2023 05:00 - 54 minutes - 124 MBDo artists have a social responsibility? Should art be «pure» and not related to ethical or political issues? What, exactly, is the role of art? These are questions that the American author Joyce Carol Oates has dealt with through a long writing life, both as an author and as a professor in creative writing at University of Princeton and UC Berkeley. Oates is a legend, and the author of more than 100 books. Known for memorable titles such as Blond, Them, Black Water, The Gravedigger’s Daugh...
My African Reading List: Masande Ntshanga
August 06, 2023 05:00 - 34 minutes - 77.9 MBMasande Ntshanga is a writer and poet, an editor of New Contrast Magazine and a teacher of creative writing. For his debut novel The Reactive, he was awarded the Betty Trask Award, while his second novel, Triangulum, was nominated for the Nommo Prize for Best Speculative Fiction Novel written by an African. His latest book is the 2020 chapbook Native Life in the Third Millennium. This is Masande's reading list: Imraan Coovadia, Tales of the Metric System A Spy in...
My African Reading List: Maaza Mengiste
July 23, 2023 05:00 - 22 minutes - 51.5 MBMaaza Mengiste is a writer, photographer and teacher of creative fiction at Wesleyan University. Her 2010 debut novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, depicts the bloody revolution in 1970s Ethiopia, and was named one of the 10 Best Contemporary African Books by the Guardian. Her second novel The Shadow King, portraying the Italo-Ethiopian war of the 1930s, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker prize in 2020. This is Maaza Mengiste’s reading list: Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy Maya Biny...
Forwards Toward the Past. Masande Ntshanga and Julia Wiedlocha
July 09, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 139 MBThe year is 2043, and an astronomer at the South-African Space Agency receives a package filled with documents, which contain a warning that the earth will end in 10 years. The documents are diary entries and audio tapes by a girl, relaying first her adolescence in the 1990s, when she explores her sexuality and tries to find her mother, who disappeared without a trace when she was little, and then moving to her daily life as an adult. Through the history of the girl, we see how South-Afric...
Brave New Worlds: Personal lecture by Masande Ntshanga
June 25, 2023 07:54 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MB«I’ve always found Science Fiction to be a form that’s irrevocably linked to critiques of power and societal structures,» writer Masande Ntshanga has said. During his adolescence, he read a lot of science fiction, and his latest novel, Triangulum, makes use of several elements from the genre. Science fiction, speculative fiction and afrofuturism are literary genres on the rise on many countries, including Norway and Ntshanga’s home country, South Africa. What makes science fiction the prefe...
Did Hemingway Write Transgender Literature? Lecture by Torrey Peters
June 11, 2023 05:00 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBWhat is transgender literature? Is it simply works by writers who identify as transgender? Or might it be thought of as a lens to read through, or a certain kind of attention? If it is the latter: in what tradition might we locate transgender literature? In this talk, American author Torrey Peters will argue for finding the roots of current transfeminine literature in older works that explore the performance of masculinity, works that in fact have been popularly accepted as containing littl...
Beyond the binary. Torrey Peters and Carline Tromp. Introduction by Christine Jentoft
June 04, 2023 05:00 - 1 hour - 60.9 MBTorrey Peters rocketed into the international literary scene with her debut novel Detransition, Baby, the first novel written by a trans woman to become an international best seller. Peters explores the complexeties of trans life, and compares transitioning to cis women starting over after a divorce: Everything you thought you knew about the future has to be scrapped, and you have to create a new identity that society doesn’t have any rules for. The novel portrays Reese, a trans woman who a...
With Your Life in the Balance. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nonhle Mbuthuma and Bergdis Joelsdottir
May 28, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MB«Every time we say it can’t get any worse it does,» writer Tsitsi Dangarembga has said about the situation in her home country Zimbabwe. The UNs special envoy has reacted to the arbitrary arrests of activists and politicians from the opposition. Last year, Dangarembga was herself convicted after partaking in a peaceful protest with one other activist in 2020. While large parts of the middle class and cultural elite has left Zimbabwe, Dangarembga has staid put and fought for change. Now she ...
Who Owns the Land and the Sea? Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, Nonhle Mbuthuma and Silje Ask Lundberg
May 28, 2023 06:00 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBJust weeks after the historical film Ellos Eatnu/Let the River Flow had premiered, lead actress and activist Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen was back in chains – for real, this time. Together with fellow Sami activists, she barricaded the Department of Oil and Energy, to protest that the authorities have done nothing in the 500 days since Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the wind park in Fosen violates the human rights of Sami reindeer herders in the area. South African Nonhle Mbuthuma has also f...
The Superwoman Black Feminist. Tsitsi Dangarembga and Maaza Mengiste
May 21, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour - 59.7 MBThrough more than 30 years, Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga has made her mark as a writer and director. With her trilogy of novels following Tambu, she portrays a period of upheaval for her home country, from life under the colonial regime of Rhodesia to the struggle for freedom and the disillusioned everyday life after independence. Her debut novel Nervous Conditions was not only the first novel in English published by a Black woman in Zimbabwe, it has become a modern classic, and in 2018, i...
My Brilliant Friend from Zimbabwe. About Tsitsi Dangarembga's trilogy
May 21, 2023 06:00 - 56 minutes - 51.3 MBA young girl from a poor family fighting to get the education she wants, but which is primarily reserved for her brother. A beautiful and worldly friend who brings her out of her shell. The history of a region told through the childhood of a young girl. This could be the description of Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet, but in fact it describes the trilogy of Tsitsi Dangarembga, began several decades earlier. In this trilogy, we follow the young girl Tambudzai from her childhood in colonised...
The Gospel of Lucy. Jamaica Kincaid and Ida Pallin Bostadløkken
April 02, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour - 153 MBJamaica Kincaid is one of the greatest authors of feminist and postcolonial literature of our time. In her handful of novels and a collection of short stories, she has portrayed themes such as structural racism, otherness and mother-daughter relationships with soberness and astonishing clarity. She has emerged as a favourite among readers and critics alike, and is increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Lucy, a young woman travels from a Caribbean island ...
When the World Collapses. Iryna Tsilyk and Åsne Seierstad
March 19, 2023 07:00 - 45 minutes - 105 MB“How will you show the destroyed city?” The Trofymchuks live in a small city in Donbas’ “Red Zone”, Ukraine, which since Russia’s invasion in 2014 has seen frequent shellings and the breakdown of infratructure. They plan to make a film showing their new daily life, and at the dinner table discuss how best to capture the destruction, uncertainty and despair that the war has brought. Just as important is the question of how to show the joys, resilience and community in their neighbourhood and...
Red Lies. Lea Ypi and Marianne Marthinsen
March 12, 2023 07:00 - 48 minutes - 110 MBAs a little girl, Lea Ypi regarded Stalin and Albania’s leader Enver Hoxha as dependable father figures, she liked how her teacher Nora har simple answers to everything, and what she wanted most of all, was to be named a pioneer. But when the communist regime falls in 1991, the young Lea suddenly realizes that nothing is truly like she thought. Has her whole life been a lie? In her memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, Ypi depicts an unusual childhood: Before she came of age, sh...
The Universal Man Caroline Criado Perez and Linn Stalsberg
March 05, 2023 07:00 - 49 minutes - 67.3 MBThe world in which we live is by and large designed and built for “the ideal man”: The size of cell phones, seat belts in cars, the development of medication – there are countless examples. And most of this we take for granted, that is how used we are, both women and men, to men being the norm, the universal form. If something is to change in the world that is constantly overlooking women, we have to first be aware that this is happening, says writer Caroline Criado Perez. In her book Invis...
Shattered Innocence. Bret Easton Ellis and Emma Clare Gabrielsen
February 19, 2023 07:00 - 57 minutes - 870 MBIt is a rare occation when the author of cult books such as American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction releases his first novel in 13 years. For readers of Bret Easton Ellis’s earlier books, The Shards has a familiar atmosphere, and he doesn’t shy away from explicit descriptions of sex or violence. We are in early 80s LA, and the main character, Bret Ellis, is 17 and a senior at the prestigious private school Buckley. A charming new student in class challenges Bret’s attempt to hide his at...
The Womanly Face of War. Maaza Mengiste and Sofi Oksanen
February 12, 2023 07:00 - 55 minutes - 76.9 MBThe young girl Hirut starts working for a wealthy couple, but is soon brought into their many quarrels, their jealousy and grief over the loss of a child. This is Ethiopia in the 1930s. Things go from bad to worse when Italy, led by Mussolini, invades the country, and Hirut’s master is tasked with organizing an opposition army. His wife refuses to wait at home for him, and creates her own force, made up by women. In the capital, emperor Selassie attempts to shut out the dire situation throug...
My African Reading List: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
January 19, 2023 10:54 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MBYvonne Adhiambo Owuor is an author, screenwriter, and former head of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. In 2003, the Kenyan won the Caine Prize for African Writing, and her 2013 debut novel, Dust, won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. In 2015, Owuor visited the House of Literature, a visit that resulted in the Norwegian publication of Dust. The critically acclaimed The Dragonfly Sea followed in 2019. These authors are on Yvonnes reading list: Makena Onjerica Oduor Okwiri Denn...
My African Reading List: Nadifa Mohamed
December 29, 2022 19:00 - 25 minutes - 393 MBNadifa Mohamed is the writer of three novels, with the two first, Black Mamba and The Orchard of Lost Souls available in Norwegian translation so far. In 2017, Mohamed participated in The House of Literature’s festival on Somali literature, A nation of poets. During the pandemic, she interviewed Arundhati Roy and Édouard Louis for the House of Literature and Linn Ullmann’s podcast How to Proceed. In 2013, she appeared on Granta’s list of best young British writers. Mohamed’s latest novel, Th...
Broken Promises. Damon Galgut and Nosizwe Lise Baqwa
December 25, 2022 19:00 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBDamon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise follows the white South-African Swart family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The story follows the nuclear family through the waning years of the apartheid state, through the 1994 liberation and until the children are grown, close to our time. Galgut’s story glides through the decades of South Africa’s recent history, weaving in and out between the various family members, often changing the perspective mid-sentence from one to anothe...
Bless Our Blue Bodies. Warsan Shire and Athena Farrokhzad
December 24, 2022 12:00 - 1 hour - 55 MBWarsan Shire is a critically acclaimed and award winning British poet. In 2016, the artist Beyoncé named her one of her favorite poets, and she appears both on the album «Lemonade» and in the film «Black Is King». In 2014, she was the first poet named Young Poet Laureate of London. Shire, born to Somali parents in Kenya and raised in Great Britain, has said that she draws on her own experiences as an immigrant, as well as those of her family and friends in what she writes. Shire has publish...
Who is Killing Us? Literature and the unveiling of power
December 22, 2022 17:00 - 1 hour - 147 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: In a world dominated by state narratives and information wars, what is the role of the writer? Power imbalances, exploitation and the dark history of Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe are among the recurring themes in the works of Finnish-Estonian writer and playwright Sofi Oksanen. Her blend of surrealist elements and real-world political plotlines allow for a literary exploration of where political power has been focused historically and where it lies today. Édouard...
Friends of Dorothy: Gay Literature and Experience. Édouard Louis and Alan Hollinghurst in conversation
December 18, 2022 07:00 - 58 minutes - 134 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: Alan Hollinghurst and Édouard Louis have long read each other’s books with great interest. While Louis has written brutally honest depictions of growing up gay in a homophobic family and environment, Hollinghurst’s fiction explores gay culture and experience through the decades, including the AIDS crisis and gay life prior to decriminalization in the UK. While Norway marks 50 years since homosexuality was decriminalized this year, LGBT rights are being curbed around the wo...
Watches that gain time: Edouard Louis and the politics of literature bookmark Lecture by Didier Eribon
December 14, 2022 07:00 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: In his most recent book, Changer : méthode, Édouard Louis shows just how indebted he is, as a writer and thinker, to the works of the French academic and author Didier Eribon. Ever since seeing him lecture early in his life, Louis and Eribon have developed a deep understanding of the other’s works and ideas, with Eribon’s novel Retour à Reims even providing the foundation for Louis’ debut novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule. In this talk, Eribon gives us his view on Loui...
Writing the Unheard-of: «The History of Violence» and the writer’s place in a violent world. Lecture by Maaza Mengiste
December 12, 2022 17:00 - 45 minutes - 105 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: A lecture by Maaza Mengiste, introduction by Édouard Louis. What is the responsibility of the writer in documenting and unpicking the violence around us? In Édouard Louis’s book The History of Violence, he explores violence from the point of view of the victim of rape and attempted murder, but also the violence that the perpetrator has experienced from society. In the novels Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King, about the bloody Ethiopian revolution and Italy’s in...
The Great Escape? Class, Culture and Friendship in «Change: Method». Lecture by Alan Hollinghurst
December 07, 2022 07:00 - 30 minutes - 70.2 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: A young gay person escapes their small town in search of friendship and love in the big city. A recurring theme as much in real life as in literature. In his most recent book, Change: Method, Édouard Louis delves deeper into his own journey – as told in The End of Eddy – from his poor upbringing and to the cultural elite in Paris, and the deliberate steps he took along the way to reinvent himself. In writing the book, Louis was deeply inspired by Alan Hollinghurst’s awa...
A Manifesto for the Working Class. Lecture by Édouard Louis
December 03, 2022 06:00 - 43 minutes - 100 MBÉdouard Louis 2022: This lecture was held on November 18th at The House of Literature in Norway, during their three days of conversations, lectures, and events from Édouard Louis’ writing and works.The lecture was written for this occasion and centres around Louis’ recent experience of losing his older brother. Few writers have championed the working class like Édouard Louis. In each of his five novels, he portrays the struggles and aspirations of an often undermined and ignored group, exem...
Claire-Louise Bennett on Checkout 19
November 14, 2022 10:18 - 53 minutes - 98.5 MBIn Checkout 19 Claire-Louise Bennett writes about the joy of reading, about when fiction becomes so vividly alive that you take it with you into the real world. Through a series of chapters - told in I-, she- and even we-form - we follow the main character's development from a little girl to an adult woman, through childhood, promiscuity and bad boyfriends. At the same time, there is a development from reader to author, but not without a series of derailments and tortuous detours: A meeting ...
Behind bars in Moscow. Kira Yarmysh and Jette F. Christensen
April 08, 2022 13:41 - 57 minutes - 79.3 MBWhat is life like for young and regime-critical Russians today? Kira Yarmysh is best known in Russia as a spokeswoman for the Russian oppositional politician Alexei Navalny. Now her debut novel Incredible Incidents in Women's Cell No. 3 is making headlines. In Russia, the book was quickly branded as "gay propaganda" by Russian authorities, due to depictions of same-sex love. Throughout the book, Yarmysh depicts a modern and contrast-filled Russia. Like her main character, Yarmysh is no strang...
Free thought, a free country. Lecture by Andrey Kurkov
April 07, 2022 14:00 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MB“Ukrainians have never accepted censorship. They have always wanted to say and write what they think. That is why almost all Ukrainian writers and poets in the 1920s and 1930s were shot by Soviet authorities… If Russia succeeds, we will have a new generation of executed writers and politicians, philosophers and philologists." How should one fight for freedom of speech and facts in a war of propaganda? What can literature and art contribute in dark times? And when does the situation require...
Deborah Levy on her "living" autobiographies
January 15, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutes - 70.1 MBDoes a house equal a home? This is one question Deborah Levy explores in her recent book Real Estate, the third and final instalment in her series of "living autobiographies", autobiographies written in the storms of life, and not in quiet contemplation towards the end of it. The need for a place of one's own - whether it be a physical place or a place in one's writing – is a recurring theme in all three volumes. Things I don't want to know (translated into Norwegian by Anne Cathrine Wollebæk...
John Freeman on Philip Roth’s America
May 22, 2020 07:00 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MBThe new HBO mini series The Plot Against America is based on the Philip Roth novel (2004) by the same name. The novel tells the counterfactual story of Charles Lindberg’s presidency, based on the real man and what might happen if he, with his fascist sympathies, was elected president of the United States around 1940.The US has become increasingly racist and polarized during Donald Trump’s presidency. What is the current situation, and how does it compare to the works of Philip Roth? In this p...
Njabulo Ndebele, Koleka Putuma and Elise Dybvig about South Afrika
March 20, 2020 07:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBNjabulo Ndebele grew up during the apartheid, and is one of South Africa's leading writers and intellectuals. He is the former vice principal at the University of Cape Town, and the author of the groundbreaking book The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he blends essay and novel, fact and fiction in an exploration of women’s position in the freedom struggle. Koleka Putuma was born in 1993, and belongs to the generation in South Africa known as «Born Free». She is behind one of the most criti...
Michael Pollan and Andreas Liebe Delsett
March 13, 2020 12:11 - 1 hour - 90 MBThrough titles such as Cooked, The Omnivore’s dilemma and In defense of Food, Michael Pollan, Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’ and of the Practice of Non-Fiction at Harvard University, has distinguished himself as one of the world’s foremost feature writers and authors of non-fiction. His latest book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is now out in its Norwegian translation, Psyk...
Gloria Gervitz in conversation with Athena Farrokhzad
February 24, 2020 11:30 - 1 hour - 116 MBMexican poet Gloria Gervitz has been writing the same poem for over forty years. The epic poem Migrations (Migraciones) is one of the greatest poetic projects of our time – a poem in constant movement through family, religion, death and sexuality, but also through perpetual newly published versions. It is based on the history of Gervitz’s own Jewish family that fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. In this episode you can hear the legendary poet in conversation with the Swed...
Lecture and conversation with Nesrine Malik
January 31, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour - 116 MBIs the assertion that freedom of expression is under pressure just a myth used to cover up more important political incompatibilities? In this event with the british-Sudanese author and Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik, held at the House of Literature 22.january 2020, Malik opened Litteraturhuset’s Commission on the Freedom of Expression. In her lecture, she talked about freedom of expression. How has the climate for free speech changed over the last twenty years? What kinds of challenges d...
Rachel Kushner and Finn Skårderud
October 11, 2019 07:00 - 57 minutes - 79.3 MBIn Norway, Rachel Kushner is best known for her 2014 novel The Flamethrowers, set in New York’s art world. In Kushner’s new, critically acclaimed and Booker nominated novel The Mars Room, we are introduced to a very different yet also very American milieu. Here we meet Romy Hall, who is in prison for killing a man who followed and tormented her. Through Hall’s life inside the prison walls, Kushner is able to describe “her country’s fall from grace. This is not the land of the free; no one ha...
Bad feminist: Roxane Gay and Eline Lund Fjæren
September 27, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 84.6 MBWhat if your view of the world is based on the experiences of black women, or those of working class, queer or transgendered women, and by that breaks with the way that the white middle class says a feminist is “supposed to be”? Gay’s collection of essays, Bad Feminist, flew right into The New York Times’ best seller list when it was published in 2014. Her sharp, vulnerable and funny voice has been applauded across genres. She is a visiting Professor at Yale University, she writes fiction,...
Igoni Barrett and Ane Farsethås on Blackass
September 06, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 94.6 MBWhat happens when blackness and whiteness are turned inside out? The Metamorphosis by Kafka is an obvious literary model when the Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett lets the main character of his last novel, Furo Wariboko, wake up on the day of his job interview to discover that his skin color has changed: He has turned white. His ass, however, remains black, and for this reason, the novel bears the title Blackass. There is sharp satire and humor in this nuanced portrait of Lagos, its citizens an...
Chris Kraus on Mary McCarthy
August 23, 2019 13:00 - 37 minutes - 69.6 MBThe American writer Chris Kraus has previously visited The House of Literature to talk about I Love Dick, a semi-autobiographic novel first published in 1997, which still attracts new readers after more than twenty years. In the House of Literature’s series “literary guiding stars”, authors are asked to talk about a writer they greatly admire. In this lecture Kraus tells about another American writer, Mary McCarthy. McCarthy is best known for her novel The Group, first published in 1959. T...
Siri Hustvedt and Linn Ullmann about Memories of the Future
June 21, 2019 07:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn Siri Hustvedt’s new novel Memories of the Future, the grown up and well established writer S.H. enters into dialogue with twenty-year-old S.H., with her reflections, her writing and her experiences. What do we forget, and how can we use our memories? The writer Linn Ullmann is among those who have long followed Hustvedt’s writing, and in her last novel, Unquiet, she also examines the past and how we remember. The conversation took place at the House of Literature on June 12, 2019. L...