The Audio Book Club Meets Karl Ove
Slate critics debate My Struggle: Book One.

This month, Dan Kois, David Haglund, and New York Times Book Review editor Parul Sehgal discuss My Struggle: Book One, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-book autobiographical epic. Can the endless accretion of detail a masterpiece make? Would people respond differently to this domestic drama if a woman wrote it? And why is this book the toast of the literary world? Listen along!
We referred to a lot of stories about Karl Ove Knausgaard in this one. Here are some links!
- Evan Hughes in the New Republic
- Evan Hughes in The New Yorker’s Page-Turner
- Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books
- William Deresiewicz in The Nation
- James Wood in The New Yorker
- Dwight Garner in the New York Times
- Christian Lorentzen in Slate
- Katie Roiphe in Slate
- The Audio Book Club on Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation
Next month the Audio Book Club will debate Roz Chast’s comics memoir of her parents’ slow decline, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Read the book and join us for our discussion on Aug. 8.
Visit our Audio Book Club archive page for a complete list of the more than 75 books we’ve discussed over the years. Or you can listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed.
---
See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.
Sign up for the Slate Book Review monthly newsletter.
Podcast produced by Abdul Rufus and Andy Bowers.