Bøger af Kristjana Gunnars

Gunnars work is as though designed for handselling: These novellas, previously published only in Canada, were the underground books of their time, smuggled over borders, beloved by booksellers-indeed, they were the tomes booksellers didn't want to pass on to just any random customer: can a bookseller just keep a book for themselves? We hope you don't…Autofiction before such a term existed: These works by writer, poet and painter Kristjana Gunnars presaged the work of writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti. For readers of Duras' The Lover, Michael Ontaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, anything by Roland Barthes, and Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal.Kazim Ali wrote the introductionThere's a pleasant 80s/90s vibe to these books, like the film An Unbearable Lightness of Being or long letters sent by mail, coin telephones, train rides unfettered by noise….Gunnars has written in dialogue with thoughts and poems and works of Italo Calvino; Hélène Cixous; Annie Dillard; Hermann Hesse; Clarise Lispector; Toni Morrison; Alain Robbe-Grillet; Christa Wolf; W.B Yeats; Antonin Artaud; Jean Cocteau; Northrop Frye; Martin Heidegger; Susan Howe; Fredric Jameson; Søren Kierkegaard; Julia Kristeva; Anaïs Nin; Marcel Proust; Virginia Woolf, and others.

At the beginning of a new writing project whether it s the first page of a new novel or a less ambitious project, writers often experience exhilaration, fear, or dread. For Kristjana Gunnars, the call of a new project is like someone you don t know knocking on your door you either choose to let the person in or not. It s both exciting and dangerous to start a new manuscript. This book is an engagement with that stranger called writing. Creative or imaginative writing is a complex process that involves more than intellect alone. Writers make use of everything: their sensibilities, history, culture, knowledge, experience, education, and even their biology. These essays seek out, and gather into a discussion, what writers have said about their own experiences in writing. Although the writers are from around the world and of very different backgrounds, the commonality of their remarks brings home the realization that writers everywhere are grappling with similar problems with the seemingly simple problems of when, where, why, and what to write, but also larger questions such as the relationship between writer and society, or issues of privacy, appropriation, or homelessness. While none of these questions can be definitively answered, they can be fruitfully discussed. Originating as questions posed in creative-writing seminars, these essays have grown into companion texts for both writers and readers who want to participate in a conversation about what writers do.