Nicole Krauss

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the author of The History of Love. For the author of The Nanny Diaries, see Nicola Kraus.

Nicole Krauss
Courtauld Institute
Literary movementPostmodernism
Notable worksMan Walks into a Room (2002)
The History of Love (2005)
Great House (2010)
Forest Dark (2017)
To Be a Man (2020)
Notable awards
Spouse
​
​
(m. 2004; div. 2014)​
Children2
Website
nicolekrauss.com

Nicole Krauss (born August 18, 1974)

Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.[5][6]

Early life

Krauss, who grew up on Long Island,[7][8] New York, was born in Manhattan, New York City, to a British Jewish mother and an American Jewish father, an engineer and orthopedic surgeon[9] who grew up partly in Israel.[10] Krauss's maternal grandparents were born in Germany and Ukraine and later emigrated to London. Her paternal grandparents were born in Hungary and Slonim, Belarus, met in Israel, and later emigrated to New York.[11] Many of these places are central to Krauss's 2005 novel, The History of Love, and the book is dedicated to her grandparents.[8]

Krauss, who started writing when she was a teenager,[12][13] wrote and published mainly poetry[13][14] until she began her first novel in 2001.

In 1987, when Krauss's father traveled with his family to Switzerland to take up a medical fellowship in

Year 9. Krauss's memories of that experience are conveyed in her autobiographical short story "Switzerland", published in 2020.[15]

Krauss enrolled in Stanford University in 1992, and that fall she met Joseph Brodsky[7] who worked closely with her on her poetry over the next three years. He also introduced her to the work of writers such as Italo Calvino and Zbigniew Herbert. In 1999, three years after Brodsky died, Krauss produced a documentary about his work for BBC Radio 3.[16] She traveled to St. Petersburg where she stood in the "room and a half" where he grew up, made famous by his essay of that title. Krauss majored in English and graduated with honors, winning several undergraduate prizes for her poetry as well as the Dean's Award for academic achievement. She also curated a reading series with Fiona Maazel at the Russian Samovar, a restaurant in New York City co-founded by Roman Kaplan, Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.[17]

In 1996 Krauss was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and enrolled in a master's program at Somerville College, Oxford,[2] where she wrote a thesis on the American artist Joseph Cornell. During the second year of her scholarship she attended the Courtauld Institute in London,[2] where she received a master's degree in art history, specializing in 17th-century Dutch art and writing a thesis on Rembrandt.

Career

Dante's Inferno in which Dante is lost in a dark forest, shown here in this engraving by Gustave Doré

In 2002,

movie rights to the novel were optioned by Richard Gere
.

Krauss's second novel,

Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction. A film of the book, directed by Radu Mihăileanu, was released in 2016.[21][22]

In spring 2007, Krauss was

Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.[23]

Her third novel,

Orange Prize 2011[24] and also won an Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards in 2011.[3]

In 2015 it was reported that Krauss had signed a $4 million deal with

Wingate Literary Prize.[5][6]

In 2020, Krauss was one of three Artists-in-Residence at

Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.[29]

In 2021, Krauss was the recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and the first to receive the newly created Inspiration Award, introduced to mark the 15th anniversary of the prize.[30]

Themes

Krauss's work often explores the relationship between

being
.

In a departure from her earlier work, Krauss's later novels progressively question and abandon traditional narrative structure in pursuit of themes more characteristic of late postmodern literature. Fragmentation and nonlinear narrative become increasingly present in her work through the use of multiple narrators whose narrative arcs may not directly meet but whose meanings are derived from resonance and pattern similarity (see The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark). The History of Love and Forest Dark employ techniques of metafiction and intertextuality, questioning the veracity of the novel's form and antagonizing the traditional contract between reader and text.[31][32] The co-protagonist of Forest Dark in particular is a novelist who shares the author's name and several biographical details, including reflections on a failed marriage to a man with whom the character has two children, considerations of the constraints of fiction, a fascination with Franz Kafka's life and writing, and a preoccupation with "Jewish mysticism, Israel and creation."[33][34] In an August 2017 interview with The Guardian, Krauss is quoted saying:

“In a sense, the self is more or less an invention from beginning to end. What is more unreal, what is more a creation than the self? Why do we have such a heavy investment in knowing what is true and what isn’t true about people’s lives? Why is it even valid to make a distinction between autobiography, auto-fiction and fiction itself? What fiction doesn’t contain a deep reflection of the author’s perspective and memory and sense of the world?”[35]

This evident blurring of the distinction between

postmodern
peers.

Personal life

Krauss lives in

Brooklyn, New York.[37] She has two children, Sasha and Cy, by her former husband, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. She and Foer married in 2004 and divorced in 2014.[37] Krauss subsequently embarked on a five-year relationship with the Israeli journalist and novelist Gon Ben Ari, whom she met when she granted him an interview several years earlier.[38][39]

Krauss enjoys swimming and dancing.[40]

Bibliography

Novels

  • Krauss, Nicole (2002).
    OCLC 809413112
    .
  • — (2005).
    OCLC 919894482
    .
  • — (2010).
    OCLC 965579634
    .
  • — (2017).
    OCLC 1003643528
    .

Short fiction

Collections
Stories[a]
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
Future Emergencies 2002 Esquire (November 1, 2002)
The last words on Earth 2004 The New Yorker (February 9, 2004)
My painter 2007 Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2 (April 16, 2007)
From the desk of Daniel Varsky 2007
Harper's
 (June 2007) 		Heidi Pitlor;
The Best American Short Stories 2008. Houghton Mifflin
.
The young painters 2010 The New Yorker 86/18 (June 28, 2010)
An arrangement of light 2012 An arrangement of light. San Francisco:
ISBN 9781614520405.[c]
Zusya on the roof 2013 The New Yorker 88/46 (February 4, 2013) Krauss, Nicole (2020). To Be a Man: Stories. HarperCollins (USA); Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).[b]
I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake 2013 The New Republic (December 2013)[d] Krauss, Nicole (2020). To Be a Man: Stories. HarperCollins (USA); Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).[b]
Seeing Ershadi 2018 The New Yorker (March 5, 2018)[e] Krauss, Nicole (2020). To Be a Man: Stories. HarperCollins (USA); Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).[b]
End of Days 2020 Krauss, Nicole (2020). To Be a Man: Stories. HarperCollins (USA); Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).[b]
Switzerland 2020 Krauss, Nicole (21 September 2020). "Switzerland". The New Yorker. 96 (28): 52–58.
To Be a Man 2020
The Atlantic (October 2, 2020)[f]
 Krauss, Nicole (2020). To Be a Man: Stories. HarperCollins (USA); Bloomsbury Publishing (UK).[b]
Long Island 2023 The New Yorker 99/13 (May 15, 2023)

Essays and reporting

Book reviews
Date Review article Work(s) reviewed
1999 Krauss, Nicole (7 November 1999). "Future Tense". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
ISBN 978-1437964127
.
2011 Nicole Krauss (29 September 2011). "Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 28 January 2015.
ISBN 978-0811217170
.

———————

Notes
  1. ^ Short stories unless otherwise noted.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Aminatta Forna (18 November 2020). "To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss review – how far do we really know ourselves?". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 December 2020.
  3. ^ Kasia Mychajlowycz (15 June 2012). "Nicole Krauss at Luminato 2012". The Toronto Review of Books. Retrieved 22 August 2012. Krauss introduced and read this novella at Luminato, Toronto's Festival of Arts and Creativity
  4. ^ Jason Diamond (6 January 2014). "'The New Republic' is Back in the Short Story Publishing Business". Vol.1 Brooklyn. Retrieved 5 September 2017.
  5. ^ Nicole Krauss. Seeing Ershadi, The New Yorker (March 5, 2018). Retrieved November 15, 2019.
  6. ^ Nicole Krauss. To Be a Man, The Atlantic (October 2, 2020). Retrieved December 2, 2020.

Awards and accolades

Notes and references

  1. ^ a b Jennifer L. Knox (21 June 2010). "20 Under 40: Q. & A. Nicole Krauss". The New Yorker. Retrieved 1 October 2017.
  2. ^ a b c "Private Passions: Nicole Krauss". BBC Radio 3, BBC website. 27 March 2011. Retrieved 12 September 2017.
  3. ^
    Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
    . 2011. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  4. ^ a b "To Be a Man". Publishers Weekly. 2020. Retrieved 12 August 2020.
  5. ^ a b Heloise Wood (16 February 2022). "Krauss short story collection clinches Wingate Prize". The Bookseller. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
  6. ^ a b David Herman (17 February 2022). "Wingate Winner Nicole Krauss opens up about the stories that stunned the judges". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
  7. ^ a b Gaby Wood (15 May 2005). "Have a heart". The Observer. Retrieved 7 April 2012.
  8. ^ a b Ann Marsh (September–October 2005). "The Emergence of Nicole Krauss". Stanford Magazine (Stanford Alumni Association). Retrieved 11 May 2011.
  9. ^ Rachel Cooke (13 February 2011). "Nicole Krauss: 'I take great pleasure in thinking'". The Observer. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  10. ^ Hannah Brown (14 May 2010). "The history of Nicole Krauss". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 27 April 2011.
  11. ^ Jessica Teisch (November–December 2010). "Nicole Krauss". Bookmarks Magazine. No. 49. Archived from the original on 11 February 2011. Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  12. ^ Bryan Cheyette (11 March 2011). "Great House By Nicole Krauss". The Independent. Retrieved 27 April 2011.
  13. ^ a b "A conversation with Nicole Krauss". Bold Type. Random House. May 2002. Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  14. ^ Boris Katchka (21 May 2005). "Bio Hazards". New York. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  15. ^ Deborah Treisman (14 September 2020). "Nicole Krauss on the Drama of Desire". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2 December 2020.
  16. ^ Nicole Krauss (7 November 1999). "Future Tense". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 28 April 2011.
  17. New York Observer. Archived from the original
    on 16 June 2011. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
  18. Village Voice
    , Retrieved May 14, 2011. "Krauss is a fluent, thoughtful writer who takes on a lot of complex ideas and rarely loses her grip on them... Man Walks Into a Room is a chilling addition to the annals of amnesia lit. It's a novel that grapples with the ephemeral experience of being human and the realization that we create a lifetime of memories that vanish when we do".
  19. ^ Gillian Flynn (2 August 2002). "Man Walks Into a Room". Entertainment Weekly. ew.com. Archived from the original on 21 October 2012. Retrieved 16 July 2011.
  20. ^ Nicole Krauss (9 February 2004). "The Last Words on Earth". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 May 2015.
  21. ^ Elsa Keslassy (2 March 2016). "Wild Bunch Sends Radu Mihaileanu's 'The History of Love' Across the World". Variety.com. Retrieved 27 March 2016.
  22. Screen Daily
    . Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  23. ^ "Nicole Krauss: Holtzbrinck Distinguished Visitor, Class of Spring 2007". American Academy in Berlin. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  24. ^ "Orange prize 2011 shortlist – in pictures". The Guardian. 12 April 2011. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  25. ^ "Forest Dark". Kirkus Reviews. 20 June 2017. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  26. ^ Francesca Segal (18 August 2017). "Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss — reality checked". Financial Times. Retrieved 1 September 2017.
  27. ^ Keziah Weir (12 September 2017). "Nicole Krauss Talks Divorce, Freedom, and New Beginnings". Elle. Retrieved 13 September 2017.
  28. ^ "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Catherine Conroy (21 September 2017). "Nicole Krauss: end of a marriage is 'terrifying but the freefall is exhilarating'". The Irish Times. Retrieved 1 November 2019.
  29. ^ "Columbia's Zuckerman Institute announces three artists-in-residence". American Association for the Advancement of Science. 4 February 2020. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
  30. Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original
    on 19 June 2023. Retrieved 18 February 2022.
  31. ^ Laura Miller (1 May 2005). "'The History of Love': Under the Influence". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  32. ^ Peter Orner (12 September 2017). "In 'Forest Dark,' Nicole Krauss Plays With Divided Selves". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  33. ^ Ron Charles (12 September 2017). "Is Nicole Krauss's new novel an act of literary revenge?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  34. ^ Luke Neima (24 August 2017). "Nicole Krauss in Conversation". Granta. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  35. ^ Erica Wagner (20 August 2017). "Nicole Krauss: 'The self is more or less an invention from beginning to end'". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  36. ^ Anna Clark (19 September 2017). "This Is Not a Novel: Reality and Realism in Nicole Krauss's "Forest Dark"". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  37. ^
    Times of Israel
    . Retrieved 20 February 2020.
  38. ^ Keziah Weir (12 September 2017). "Nicole Krauss Talks Divorce, Freedom, and New Beginnings". Elle. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
  39. ^ Moran Sharir (1 April 2021). "A Man Stands Up and Decides He's a Guru: the Writer Gon Ben Ari Explains His Metamorphosis". Haaretz. Retrieved 1 April 2021.
  40. ^ Hannah Beckerman (15 September 2017). "Nicole Krauss: 'In water you can think differently'". Financial Times. Retrieved 13 August 2020.

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Nicole Krauss.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicole_Krauss&oldid=1217816567"