Professor Andersen’s Night Book Talk With Dag Solstad

Award-winning Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad joins us with author Rebecca Dinerstein for a book talk on his newest novel, an existential murder mystery titled Professor Andersen’s Night. On Christmas Eve, 55-year-old professor Pål Andersen sits alone in his living room, drinking coffee and cognac and lost in a train of thought, when he glances out the window and sees a man strangling a woman across the street. Paralyzed by indecision, he finds himself unable to call the police or even his friends. Over the night that follows, he instead finds himself obsessing about the murderer’s whereabouts — until he later finds himself face-to-face with the killer himself.

An unsettling yet highly entertaining novel, written in Dag Solstad’s signature concise, dark, and witty prose, Professor Andersen’s Night examines mid-life crisis and social critique in the wake of a senseless tragedy.

Following the discussion, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.

“With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss.”—Publisher’s Weekly

Dag Solstad (b. 1941) has written nearly thirty books, including Professor Andersen’s Night and Novel 11, Book 18 (forthcoming from New Directions). He is admired worldwide by writers as diverse as Peter Handke and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Solstad has won the 2006 Brage Prize, the 1989 Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature, and the Norwegian Critics’ Prize in 1969, 1992, and 1999.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a bilingual English-Norwegian collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker online, among others.

Her new novel Hex comes out in March 2020, and The Sunlit Night is forthcoming as a feature film.