Non-Fiction_HUMANITIES

What exactly is hope?
The internationally recognized philosopher Lars Fr. H. Svendsen turns his gaze towards hope – and it is not entirely without reason. Right now the need for hope might be bigger than ever.
The Ukrainian population’s reaction to the Russian invasion February 2022 revived an old idea Lars Fr. H. Svendsen had about writing a philosophy of hope. In the range of emotions in the Ukrainian population, such as rage, despair and grief, it was hope that stood first – the hope that they would be able to resist the onslaught of Russian supremacy and preserve their freedom.
In A Philosophy of Hope, Svendsen takes us on a journey through the history of philosophy and shows what the most central thinkers have written about hope. As always it is with sharp analysis, insight and wit from one our the best communicators of philosophy today.

Audr means wealth. It was a common name for women in the Viking age, emphasising their importance in society. They were poets, skilled artisans and entrepreneurs who had their own ships. Women traded, led expeditions and played a crucial role in sharing knowledge, educating and protecting societal values. It was women who were responsible for textile manufacture and the preparation and storage of food, in addition to their important duties as healers.
In this book, we follow Aud the Deep-Minded, a rural Norwegian woman, on a 4,000 kilometre journey throughout her life, from her childhood in Norway to her adulthood in Ireland, Scotland and the Hebrides and her old age in Iceland. Kim Hjardar uses Aud’s story as a prism. How can we consider the role of women and the opportunities available to them in the Viking period?
Women in the Viking Age offers a journey of discovery through a history that has been overlooked. Through engaging writing and thought-provoking illustrations of both reconstructions and archaeological finds, the book provides a fascinating insight into the lives of Viking women.

The first time Frida Grünfeld was registered in a police record was spring 1931. She was Jewish, a prostitute, suspected of espionage – and she was pregnant.
Frida was born in Leles, Slovakia in 1908, which was Austria-Hungary at the time. She lived a vagrant life the newly established Czehcoslovakia after WW1. In Bratislava she gave birth to a son, Berthold; but gave him away when he was only a week old. He later came to Norway as a refugee and became one of Norway’s most recognised psychiatrists.
But what happened to Frida? In this book, the grandaughter Nina F. Grünfeld returns and searches for her grandmother. Through archives she finds interrogation files and court documents revealing clues and information, and she learns how the web is winding ever closer around Frida. The authorities were looking for people like her. Then the Nazis came to power.
The story of Frida is a shocking tale of belonging, want and loss.

Spice is basically one of the most local things there is. The cinnamon bark comes from Sri Lanka. Cloves once only grew on the tiny Maluku Islands east of Indonesia. Nutmeg only existed on the volcanic Banda Islands a little further south.

Nevertheless, these rare, marvelous growths have become the most widespread commodities in world history: a source of globalization and empire building, contact and conflict, exchange and exploitation from the very oldest civilizations to the present day. Reinertsen Berg follows the strands of spices back to earth’s ancient history, explaining why the unique plants grow exactly where they do and what is so special about them.

With a brown leather suitcase in his hand Vidkun Quisling leaves for Ukraine to save ordinary people’s lives from starvation and death — later on he leaves for Berlin, carrying the same suitcase, to meet with Adolf Hitler. When Trude Lorentzen buys the infamous traitor’s suitcase at an auction many years later, it’s the beginning of a vivid and compelling investigative hunt through history. Who was this man who aimed to become Norway’s own Nazi dictator? Why did he choose to betray his own country and people? His brown leather suitcase has witnessed it all: cannibalism, bigamy — and in total eleven visits to Der Führer.

Quisling’s Suitcase is a strong story from the past that speaks to us today, and the book comments on current events with frightening precision. A book on how to choose the right or wrong way when we face an important cross road. The book is based on the podcast success «Quisling’s suitcase», but offers lots of new, never before published material to the readers.

Echo was the nymph who talked too much. For this, she was sentenced to a fate in which she could only repeat what others said.

In this essay, Lena Lindgren combines economics, mythology, psychology and science with scenes from Silicon Valley. It is a judgement of our age, a stream of consciousness, and an attempt to portray humanity’s blind date with artificial intelligence.

Ida Lødemel Tvedt’s first book has been hailed by Norwegian critics for its vitality and uncompromising wit. She ranges brilliantly over a wide range of topics: nationalism and solitude, love and rage, milk and makeup, pornography and standup comedy, intellectual posturing and the role of confession in public life.
A deeply uncanny portrait of our time emerges, as her encounters with autistic children and her senile grandmother, Kremlin the cockroach and Sebastian the alt-right ideologue, all become occasions for slapstick dialectics and a defiantly lush prose.
Chapters shift between differing essayistic modes, from portraits and interviews, to street wanderings and monologues, amounting to a spectacular experiment in ecstatic essayism.

Into the unknown: we don’t know where we’re going. We are sailing in a leaky boat; we know that we’re dying animals. With dreams of Byzantium, we bail out as much water as we can, sailing onward, together. We are Argonauts, astronauts, adventurers, explorers. This is our journey.
I have a congenital muscular dystrophy. I use a wheelchair. I have a college education, a job. I’m a family man. On the surface, I’m well-off. What had to happen for me to reach this point?
I Live a Life Like Yours is about life in a vulnerable body. It is a story about work, about dreams and a longing to live like everyone else. It is a book about life, both common and uncommon.

Winner of the 2018 Norwegian Critics’ Prize Nominated for the the 2019 Nordic Council Literature Prize

What would your dog say if it could talk? Most of us assumes that a dog is happy when it wags its tail, or that the cat is happy when it meows and curls up on your lap. But how do the animals surrounding us with think? And can we understand them?
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen has written a book about understanding animals, with examples and discussions from the history of philosophy. From the French philosopher who feel shame when he stands naked in the bathroom and the cat looks at him, to the philosophical questions whether animals can be lonely.
Understanding Animals is an informative, entertaining and witful book about animals and whether it makes sense to describe our animals with human characteristics.

What is a map? How have people been drawing the world up through history? What do maps say about us?
Theatre of the world. The history of maps is a unique book with the full and incredible history of maps. Thomas Reinertsen Berg takes us all the way from the mysterious symbols of the Stone Age to Google Earth in a fascinating tale on science and the view of the world, about art and technology, about power and ambitions, about practical needs and distant dreams of the unknown.
Along the way, we encounter visionary geographers and heroic explorers along with the unknown heroes of the history of maps. A fantastic visual material allows us to immerse ourselves in the history of maps with our own eyes.
Winner of the 2017 Brage Prize for best non-fiction book in Norway

A brilliant and personal examination by Karl Ove Knausgård of his Norwegian compatriot Edvard Munch, the famed artist best known for his iconic painting The Scream.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgård sets out to understand the enduring and awesome power of Edvard Munch’s work by training his gaze on the landscapes that inspired Munch and speaking firsthand with other contemporary artists, including Anselm Kiefer, for whom Munch’s legacy looms large. Bringing together art history, biography, and memoir, Knausgård tells a passionate, freewheeling, and pensive story about not just one of history’s most significant painters, but the very meaning of choosing the artist’s life, as he himself has done. Including reproductions of some of Munch’s most emotionally and psychologically intense works, chosen by Knausgaard, this utterly original and ardent work of criticism will delight and educate both experts and novices of literature and the visual arts alike.

Throughout history, the soul has been regarded as the core of the human being and as an expression of the individual’s personality. Most people also feel they have one, although it is hard to explain what the soul exactly is. This is the aim of this book. By following the stages of the fateful drama of the soul from antiquity to present day, the book examines what significance it still may have in the 21st century.
This book tells the reader how the depiction of the soul in fictional literature and the conception of it in philosophy have formed the images and stories of the soul in Western culture that we still carry with us as a palimpsest that has been imprinted on our minds.

Jon Fosse is a playwright, novelist and poet, but has also published two collections of essays. Both these books are now gathered in one volume. Fosse’s essays are a rich source of that which among other things became known as Fosse’s views on literature and theatre, but also about Fosse himself. And occasionally he does write something more theoretical. At the end of this book you will find an essay that has not been published in Norwegian earlier, Skrivingas gnosis (The Gnosis of Writing).