Praise for Vaim

"Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway... This is unforgettable."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fosse’s intrepid, seductive, highly accomplished writing perfectly fits the intricate human truths he seeks to convey.”—Eimear McBride, The Observer

“Vaim floats between states, intermingling life and death, present and past, an interstitial novel about lives that never quite arrive at their culmination.”—Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

"A mesmerizing little fable about—perhaps—patience, grace and fate...there is much to admire in Fosse’s rhythmic prose, his bursts of humor and heightened sense of life’s pervasive oddness."—Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal

“How can prose that is so simple – cushions are “nice”, work is “trusty” – pulse with such feeling? How can it be so littoral, incarnating the light and spray and tidal tempos of these seascapes with such power? And how can a novelist make a reader feel so lost and so found at the same time? It is strange. A strange miracle.”—The Guardian

“The novel's three movements, beautifully composed, are pattern-like rather than progressive in their exploration of the intersections between lives: Fosse might say 'musical.' Yet their careful measure doesn’t diminish our sense of a shape determined by accidentality... We're entangled in knots of syntax and time, in the utterly riveting banalities that preoccupy people.”—Amit Chaudhuri, The New Statesman

“A breathless line of prose that resists the conventions of contemporary fiction… Thought and feeling, memory and anticipation coexist and collide, suspending action and reflection…making the act of deliberation as consequential as the choice itself.”—“Editor’s Choice,” Leah Dworkin, BOMB

"Immersive, even trance-like. Fosse’s novels enter the strange, conversational cadence of another person’s mind, their personal attunements and idiosyncratic desires...Vaim is as strange and surprising as life itself, drifting away from any expected course."—Bekah Waalkes, The Financial Times

“Exhilarating . . . In Vaim, we’re carried along in the anxious mutability of drift, wake, current, float.”—Ania Szremski, 4Columns

"Mysterious and playful... the translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones."—The Irish Times

“Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the ‘ordinary” mind,’ from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond.”
— Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

"Three residents of a coastal Norwegian town ponder life, love, and what might’ve been... A fine portrait of uncertainty."—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Septology

“Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine.”—Merve Emre, The New Yorker

“An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself… The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career.”—Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times

“With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.”—Wyatt Mason, Harper's

“I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.” —Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books

“In The Other Name's rhythmic accumulation of words, [there is] something incantatory and self-annihilating—something that feels almost holy.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“It ties 2666 by Roberto Bolaño as my favorite book from the 21st century… What I read was nothing less than a desperate prayer made radiant by sudden spikes of ecstatic beauty.”—Lauren Groff, Literary Hub

“The Other Name trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction. In Fosse’s hands, God is a difficult, pungent, overwhelmingly aesthetic force, ‘the invisible inside the visible.’”—Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

"Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.”—The Guardian

“Its striking characters and whiplash prose make for compulsive reading, engrossing from the start, unforgettable at the end.”—World Literature Today

“Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative, which is only the first part of what promises to be a major work of Scandinavian fiction.” —Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

“Hypnotic, soothing, intellectually reverent. Damion Searls is the perfect translator for Fosse's unending sentences, that repeat and circle back on themselves with mathematical beauty, creating some of the most significant literature I've read on alcoholism, faith, and artmaking I can remember. Septology could fill a hundred volumes, and I would read forever.”—Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

“The further away I get from this, the more convinced I am that it is a genuine masterpiece…I put everything else away. I needed the rhythm of Fosse’s sentence, his intractable Catholicism, his symphonic prayer. It soothed my brain with sadness, the way only something truly beautiful can.”—Bee, Pegasus Books (Berkeley, CA)

“Jon Fosse is a major European writer.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

“Masterful ... From the very first word, I wanted to read the book straight through in one go. ... A brilliant novel. ... Fosse’s way of “painting” pictures in words is gripping and truly different from what can be found in any other literature. ... A simplified universe full of wonder, intensity, and warm humor.”—Gro Jørstad Nilsen, Bergens Tidende