Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss at the 2011 Miami Book Fair International
Born (1974-08-18) August 18, 1974
Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation Novelist and short story writer
Language English
Nationality American
Education Stanford University; Oxford University; Courtauld Institute
Literary movement Postmodernism
Notable works Man Walks Into a Room (2002)
The History of Love (2005)
Great House (2010)
Forest Dark (2017)
Notable awards
Spouse
Jonathan Safran Foer
(m. 2004; div. 2014)
Children 2
Website
nicolekrauss.com

Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974)[1] is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks Into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017). Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003 and Best American Short Stories 2008. Her novels have been translated into 35 languages.[2] In 2010, she was selected as one of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" writers to watch.[1] In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House.[3]

Early life

Krauss, who grew up on Long Island,[4][5] was born in Manhattan, New York City to a British Jewish mother and an American Jewish father, an engineer and orthopedic surgeon[6] who grew up partly in Israel.[7] Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later immigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later immigrated to New York.[8] Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.[5]

Krauss, who started writing when she was a teenager,[9][10] wrote and published mainly poetry[10][11] until she began her first novel in 2001.

Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky[4] who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to the work of writers such as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3.[12] She traveled to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with honors, winning several undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York City co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.[13]

In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a master's program at Oxford University[2] where she wrote a thesis on the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London,[2] where she received a master's in art history, specializing in 17th-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.

Career

In 2002, Krauss published her acclaimed[14][15] first novel, Man Walks Into a Room. A meditation on memory and personal history, solitude and intimacy, the novel won praise from Susan Sontag and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. The movie rights to the novel were optioned by Richard Gere.

Her second novel, The History of Love, was first published as an excerpt in The New Yorker in 2004. The novel, published in the United States by W.W. Norton, weaves together the stories of Leo Gursky, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor from Slonim, the young Alma Singer who is coping with the death of her father, and the story of a lost manuscript also called The History of Love. A film of the book, directed by Radu Mihăileanu, was released in 2016.[16][17]

In spring 2007, Krauss was Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.[18]

Her third novel, Great House, connects the stories of four characters to a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. It was named a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction and was short-listed for the Orange Prize 2011[19] and also won an Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2011.[3]

In 2015 it was reported that she had signed a $4 million deal with Harper Collins to publish her next two works: a novel, and also a book of short stories entitled How to Be a Man.[20] The novel, which was originally to be called Late Wonder,[20] is entitled Forest Dark and was published in 2017.[21]

Themes

Krauss's work often explores the relationship between Jewish history and identity, the limited capacity of language and communication to produce understanding, loneliness, and memory. These themes are readily appreciable beginning in her first novel Man Walks Into a Room, wherein the protagonist loses years of lived memory while retaining all cognitive function. Playing with tenets of cognitive neuroscience and metaphysics, Man Walks Into a Room considers the relative roles of lived experience, materiality, and cognitive memory in shaping personal identity and being.

In a departure from her earlier work, Krauss's later novels progressively question and abandon traditional narrative structure in pursuit of themes more characteristic of high postmodern literature. Fragmentation and nonlinear narrative become increasingly present in her work through the use of multiple narrators whose narrative arcs may not directly meet but whose meanings are derived from resonance and pattern similarity (see The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark). The History of Love and Forest Dark employ techniques of metafiction and intertextuality, questioning the veracity of the novel's form and antagonizing the traditional contract between reader and text. [22] [23] The co-protagonist of Forest Dark in particular is a novelist who shares the author's name and several biographical details, including reflections on a failed marriage to a man with whom the character has 2 children, considerations of the constraints of fiction, a fascination with Franz Kafka's life and writing, and a preoccupation with "Jewish mysticism, Israel and creation."[24][25] In an August 2017 interview with The Guardian, Krauss is quoted saying:

“In a sense, the self is more or less an invention from beginning to end. What is more unreal, what is more a creation than the self? Why do we have such a heavy investment in knowing what is true and what isn’t true about people’s lives? Why is it even valid to make a distinction between autobiography, auto-fiction and fiction itself? What fiction doesn’t contain a deep reflection of the author’s perspective and memory and sense of the world?” [26]

This evident blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction seems to reflect a rejection of objectivism in favor of sublime relativism, [27] and unites Krauss with the wider gestalt common to her postmodern peers.

Personal life

In June 2004, Krauss married novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and they had two children together, Sasha and Cy. Krauss and Foer separated in 2014.[28][29] Krauss lives in Brooklyn, New York.[29]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Novels

  • Krauss, Nicole (2002). Man Walks Into a Room. Doubleday. ISBN 9781407413365. OCLC 809413112.
  • — (2005). The History of Love: a novel. W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780241973639. OCLC 919894482.
  • — (2010). Great House. W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393079982. OCLC 965579634.
  • — (2017). Forest Dark. HarperCollins. ISBN 9781443408684. OCLC 1003643528.

Short stories

Title Year First published Reprinted/collected in
Future emergencies 2002 Esquire (November 2002) Kennison, Katrina; Mosley, Walter, eds. (2003). The Best American Short Stories 2003. Houghtin Mifflin.
The last words on Earth 2004 The New Yorker (February 9, 2004)
My painter 2007 Granta 97 (Spring 2007)
From the desk of Daniel Varsky 2007 Harper's (June 2007) Pitlor, Heidi; Rushdie, Salman, eds. (2008). The Best American Short Stories 2008. Houghtin Mifflin.
The young painters 2010 The New Yorker 86/18 (June 28, 2010)
An arrangement of light 2012 An arrangement of light. San Francisco: Byliner. 2012. ISBN 9781614520405. [30]
Zusya on the roof 2013 The New Yorker 88/46 (February 4, 2013)
I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake 2013 The New Republic (December 2013)[31]
Seeing Ershadi 2018 The New Yorker (March 5, 2018)[32]

Essays and reporting

  • Krauss, Nicole (Winter 2003). "Philip Guston : the first painter after the last" (PDF). Modern Painters: 86–91. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
  • — (April 18, 2005). "My summer in Poland". Are We There Yet?. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
  • — (2011). "Preface". In Hemon, Aleksandar. Best European Fiction 2012. Dalkey Archive Press. ISBN 9781564786807.
  • — (March 24, 2011). "Writer's block: the end of bookstores". The New Republic. Retrieved January 28, 2015.

Review columns

Date Review article Work(s) reviewed
1999 Krauss, Nicole (November 7, 1999). "Future Tense". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 16, 2017. Brodsky, Joseph (1995). Discovery. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
2011 Krauss, Nicole (September 29, 2011). "Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño – review". The Guardian. Retrieved January 28, 2015. Bolaño, Robert (2010). Antwerp. New York: New Directions Publishing. ISBN 0811217175.

Awards

Notes and references

  1. 1 2 Jennifer L. Knox (June 21, 2010). "20 Under 40: Q. & A. Nicole Krauss". The New Yorker. Retrieved October 1, 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 "Private Passions: Nicole Krauss". BBC Radio 3, BBC website. March 27, 2011. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
  3. 1 2 "Nicole Krauss: Great House". 2011 Fiction. Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. 2011. Retrieved March 27, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Gaby Wood (May 15, 2005). "Have a heart". The Observer. Retrieved April 7, 2012.
  5. 1 2 Ann Marsh (September–October 2005). "The Emergence of Nicole Krauss". Stanford Magazine (Stanford Alumni Association). Retrieved May 11, 2011.
  6. ↑ Rachel Cooke (February 13, 2011). "Nicole Krauss: 'I take great pleasure in thinking'". The Observer. Retrieved March 27, 2016.
  7. ↑ Hannah Brown (May 14, 2010). "The history of Nicole Krauss". Jerusalem Post. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
  8. ↑ Jessica Teisch (Nov–Dec 2010). "Nicole Krauss". Bookmarks Magazine (49). Retrieved April 28, 2011.
  9. ↑ Bryan Cheyette (March 11, 2011). "Great House By Nicole Krauss". The Independent. Retrieved April 27, 2011.
  10. 1 2 "A conversation with Nicole Krauss". Bold Type. Random House. May 2002. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
  11. ↑ Boris Katchka (May 21, 2005). "Bio Hazards". New York. Retrieved March 27, 2016.
  12. ↑ Nicole Krauss (November 7, 1999). "Future Tense". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
  13. ↑ Leon Neyfakh (December 20, 2007). "Farrar, Straus and Giroux To Host Monthly Reading Series at Russian Samovar". New York Observer. Archived from the original on June 16, 2011. Retrieved April 26, 2011.
  14. ↑ Joy Press (May 21, 2002). Living in Oblivion,Village Voice, Retrieved May 14, 2011. "Krauss is a fluent, thoughtful writer who takes on a lot of complex ideas and rarely loses her grip on them... Man Walks Into a Room is a chilling addition to the annals of amnesia lit. It's a novel that grapples with the ephemeral experience of being human and the realization that we create a lifetime of memories that vanish when we do".
  15. ↑ Gillian Flynn (August 2, 2002). "Man Walks Into a Room". Entertainment Weekly. ew.com. Retrieved July 16, 2011.
  16. ↑ Elsa Keslassy (March 2, 2016). "Wild Bunch Sends Radu Mihaileanu's 'The History of Love' Across the World". Variety.com. Retrieved March 27, 2016.
  17. ↑ Lisa Nesselson (September 27, 2016). "'The History Of Love': Review". Screendaily. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  18. ↑ "Nicole Krauss: Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor, Class of Spring 2007". American Academy in Berlin. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
  19. ↑ "Orange prize 2011 shortlist – in pictures". The Guardian. April 12, 2011. Retrieved October 2, 2017.
  20. 1 2 Leah Finnegan (March 27, 2015). "Nicole Krauss Gets $4 Million for a Book Called How to Be a Man". TKTK. Retrieved March 26, 2016.
  21. ↑ "Forest Dark: Kirkus Review". Kirkus Reviews. June 20, 2017. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
  22. ↑ Miller, Laura (1 May 2005). "'The History of Love': Under the Influence". The New York Times. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  23. ↑ Orner, Peter (12 September 2017). "In 'Forest Dark,' Nicole Krauss Plays With Divided Selves". The New York Times. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  24. ↑ Charles, Ron (12 September 2017). "Is Nicole Krauss's new novel an act of literary revenge?". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  25. ↑ Neima, Luke (24 August 2017). "Nicole Krauss in Conversation". Granta. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  26. ↑ Wagner, Erica (20 August 2017). "Nicole Krauss: 'The self is more or less an invention from beginning to end'". The Guardian. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  27. ↑ Clark, Anna (19 September 2017). "This Is Not a Novel: Reality and Realism in Nicole Krauss's "Forest Dark"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved October 9, 2018.
  28. ↑ Annabel Fenwick Elliott (June 18, 2014). "Extremely quiet and incredibly amicable: Literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss SPLIT following a secret year-long separation". Daily Mail. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
  29. 1 2 JTA (June 19, 2014). "Authors Foer, Krauss have been separated for a year". Times of Israel. Retrieved August 30, 2014.
  30. ↑ Kasia Mychajlowycz (June 15, 2012). "Nicole Krauss at Luminato 2012". The Toronto Review of Books. Retrieved August 22, 2012. Krauss introduced and read this novella at Luminato, Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity
  31. ↑ Jason Diamond (January 6, 2014). "'The New Republic' is Back in the Short Story Publishing Business". Vol.1 Brooklyn. Retrieved September 5, 2017.
  32. ↑ Krauss, Nicole. Seeing Ershadi, The New Yorker (March 5, 2018)

Further reading

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.