Late last night, as I tore through a section of Dave Newman's Two Small Birds where the narrator expresses his admiration for Knut Hamsun's Hunger, I turned to my left, and sure enough it was the only book on the stool by my bed (linked to the edition I own, translated by Robert Bly and with an introduction by Isaac Bashevis Singer).
This reminded me of the other Pittsburgh novel, Said Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards Will Be Free, and how I was about to fall asleep early after reading a page with the sentence, "The clock on the wall read 8:50." I checked my cell phone, and sure enough, it was 8:52 p.m.
I'll just tidy up, find the Hunger links, and escape this entry without mentioning Mr. Coincidence, Paul Auster (who, by the way, has written an introduction to a different edition of Hunger).
Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
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1 comment:
Hunger is my favorite novel, and has been ever since I first read it during college in the mid 1980s. Shortly before I published my debut novel Wheatyard with Pablo D'Stair at Kuboa Press last year, he told me that he named the press after "kuboaa", a word Hamsun coined for Hunger. He said he did so because Hunger meant more to him than any novel in the world, both as a person and artist. Interesting what serendipity that novel seems to create.
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