Translated by Sverre Lyngstad
Introduction by Paul Auster
First published in 1890 Hunger is regarded as one of the major modernist novels, anticipating and influencing much fiction that was to follow, from Joyce to Kafka to Camus and Kelman.
Set in Oslo, Hunger is a compelling journey into the mind of a young writer who is driven by starvation to constantly fluctuating extremes of euphoria and despair. It is a study of the psychological hinterlands—to the very edges of experience—where few writers have the courage to tread.
andHunger
‘Never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it.’
‘Its flashing power has not faded.’
‘An excellent new translation…this Hunger deserves to be the standard English version.’
‘Hunger is the crux of Hamsun’s claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky.’
‘At the vanguard of modernist endeavour, Hamsun left his mark on writers as diverse as Kafka and Hemingway. His most acclaimed work, Hunger, is more extraordinary because it predates the flourishing of modernist literature in the first decades of the 20th Century…Hunger is a disturbing book in which not much happens, yet it’s influence on…modernist fiction is incalculable. Sverre Lyngstad’s fine translation with its illuminating introduction by Paul Auster is essential reading.’
