LitHouse podcast

In 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, Kush...

What 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 be...

What 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 ti...

The 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 wri...

In 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...

Several women who have survived brutal imprisonment and sexual violence in Syria are part of lawsuit initiatives against the current government. How may these initiatives contribute to hold the government responsible for their crimes, and to better the situation for Syrian women? Ibrahim Olabi is director of the Syrian Legal Development Program, and works with human rights issues connected to the...

How can we understand the movement Gilets Jaunes – the Yellow vests? What does this police violence against blacks say about the official French view of black people? Édouard Louis’s latest novel, Qui a tué mon père, or Who Killed My Father, has recently been published in Norwegian and English translations. Here, Louis writes about his father’s broken body. He recognizes the same broken, French wo...

Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar within fields such as feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory. In her most recent project, Ahmed has interviewed staff and students about their experiences of making complaints about unequal working conditions or abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The project has returned her to core questions about the role of emotions not only in how...

There is a longstanding literary tradition of portraying the city of Istanbul in writing, both by Turkish and other writers. Where does Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez place himself within this tradition? In his novel Istanbul, Istanbul, four political prisoners are held captive below the city. Afraid to expose each other under torture, they refrain from telling each other personal details. Instead,...

The American writer Kristen Roupenian caused a sensation when her debut short story «Cat Person» was published in The New Yorker in 2017. With #Metoo at its peak, the story’s treatment of bad sex made it The New Yorker’s most-read online fiction text of all time. Roupenian’s debut collection contains horror elements and a fine-meshed humor emerging when humans and power relations are exposed in a...

In French Moroccan Leïla Slimani’s books, the psychological development of the characters is what captures the reader. Lullaby explores the interactions of a small upper middle-class family. What power struggles take place within the walls of this Parisian apartment? What secrets are buried in the nanny’s past? And how do the children end up dead? Leïla Slimani’s conversation with editor of Vindue...

This year marks 101 years since the birth of one of the world’s most influential artists: Ingmar Bergman. The anniversary last year brought renewed focus to his films, but what about his writing? During his life, Bergman wrote more than 150 plays, film manuscripts, essays, articles and works of fiction. The Best Intentions (1991), Sunday’s Children (1992) and Private Confessions (1996) are often r...

How are the Syrian refugees working today to understand and to process what happened before and during the war? What are their thoughts on the current situation? In her book We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled , Wendy Pearlman has gathered testimonies from some of the many hundred exiled Syrians she has interviewed, after they were forced to flee during the first years of the war. Wendy Pearlman i...

In German Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, The End of Days , her main character dies a total of five times; first as a baby, then as a young girl in a Europe between two world wars, then as a revolutionary fallen from grace in one of Stalin’s Siberian camps, then as a celebrated East-German writer and lastly as a 91 year old in a nursing home in a reunited Berlin. Erpenbeck is considered one o...

Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon is a central voice in the new wave of literature from Central America and the Caribbean. The episodic and absurd novel The Polish Boxer moves between the university campus in Guatemala City to the Balkan of gypsys via the Nazis’ concentration camps. The traveler is a university teacher searching for a pianist who might be a gypsy. But he is also searching for his o...

Valeria Luiselli, translated into more than twenty languages, is a central name in Mexican contemporary literature. Her debut novel, Faces in the crowd , has made critics compare Luiselli to writers such as Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. It has now been published in Norwegian, translated by Ingrid Mefald Hafredal. In Faces in the crowd , several temporal levels and several story strands are weaved tog...

In her essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions , the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli explores the fates of Latin American child migrants in and on their way to the US. Luiselli herself lives in the US, and in an acute refugee situation, she volunteered as an interpreter and gained first hand knowledge about the violence and discrimination that the refugees experience. Photographer, wri...

A. S. Byatt was named one of Britain’s fifty greatest writers by The Times in 2008. Her literary breakthrough, Possession: A Romance , was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Byatt visited the House of Literature in connection with the 2011 Norwegian publication of her novel The Children's Book , which is set in Southern England in the late 19th century. In conversation with Duke University prof...

Daniel Mendelsohn is a Classics professor, and teaches his students the classic epic The Odyssey . One Spring, his 81 year old father decides to take his class. But what kind of a hero was Oddyseus, really? the father asks critically - a liar who cheated on his wife! This is the starting point for Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic . In this podcast, Mendelsohn tal...

Ariel Levy is a successful journalist in The New Yorker , where she often writes about women who break with the traditional expectations in how you express and live gender and sexuality. She has a nice little house and is married to the woman in her life. When she, at 37, also becomes pregnant, her life is perfect. Or not. The Rules Do Not Apply (translated into Norwegian by Rune R. Moen) is Levy’...

The Sellout is about an America so steeped in its racist history that race becomes unavoidable. But nobody wants to talk about it, and there is no end of human oblivion, foolishness and evil. The Guardian has dubbed Beatty the funniest writer in America. However, the novel is also characterized by an immensely precise language and deadly seriousness. At the House of Literature, Beatty met writer,...

Autumn (translated into Norwegian by Merete Alfsen) is the first in Scottish Ali Smith’s season quartet. Winter has already come out in English. In both books, hope, warmth, sensuality and humanity is articulated as a contrast to political lies and cowardice. Art is portrayed as a path to a truer, more beautiful and sharper understanding of the world. Exploring human relations and art as a way to...

In this episode, you can hear a lecture by Oxford historian and author of The Silk Roads, Peter Frankopan, about the history of the Crusades, as seen from Asia. The lecture was delivered as part of the 2018 International Saladin Days, on March 6th, 2018. Lithouse is a podcast from the House of Literature in Oslo, presenting adapted versions of lectures and conversations featuring international wri...

Colson Whiteheads novel The Underground Railroad was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It soon became a #1 New York Times Bestseller, it got picked by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, and the US President Obama chose it for his summer reading list. The book mixes the historical novel with allegory and sci-fi, as Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who...

In this episode, you can hear a conversation between Martin Puchner and Helge Jordheim about literature’s role in shaping the world. What came first – the world as we know it, or the stories about the world? Puchner is one of the world’s foremost literary critics and scholars, and professor at the University of Harvard. Jordheim is professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo. The conve...