A New Name Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award

We're thrilled to share that A New Name by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, has been named a finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The winner will be announced in an awards ceremony at The New School in New York on March 23, 2023.

The other shortlisted titles are Percival Everett’s Dr. No (Graywolf Press), Mieko Kawakami’s All the Lovers in the Night, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Europa Editions), Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows (Hogarth Books). We’re proud to publish Namwali’s Stranger Faces as part of our Undelivered Lectures series.

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

Jon and Damion spoke to Words Without Borders on the occasion, reflecting on the art of translation and their long-standing relationship.

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