"He has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterward... sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened." --Aftenposten

Called "the new Ibsen," and heralded throughout Europe, Jon Fosse is one of contemporary Norwegian literature's most important writers. Born in 1959, he has published some thirty books of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction since 1983.