A New Name Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

We're delighted to share that A New Name by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, has been longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. The ten books being considered for the award were originally published in nine different languages. The shortlist will be announced on October 4.

A New Name, which was also a finalist for the 2022 International Booker Prize, is the final installment in Fosse's three-volume Septology, receiving reviews in The New York Times, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere.

About A New Name

Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

In this final installment of Jon Fosse’s Septology, “a major work of Scandinavian fiction” (Hari Kunzru), we follow the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; and makes a living by trying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience—incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

"An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself… The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career."—Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times