7 h 35 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 7 h 35 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the pride that keeps you writing also keeps you hungry?
In Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, a nameless young writer walks the streets of Kristiania, trying to turn words into enough money to eat. Editors buy or refuse his articles. He drifts through cheap rooms and sometimes sleeps in a park, holding tight to his belief in his talent.
He could ask for help, but pride makes each admission of need feel costly. As hunger wears down his mind, hope gives way to small lies, sudden joy, kindness and cruelty. A young woman he calls Ylajali offers a glimpse of warmth. Through his own restless account, the novel asks what art costs a person.
What you’ll discover
- A mind under strain Follow thoughts that grow strange and quick as hunger changes the narrator’s senses.
- Pride against need Watch a writer resist the simple admissions that could ease his daily struggle.
- The streets of Kristiania Walk through streets, cheap rooms and a park where shelter is never certain.
- The warmth of Ylajali Meet the woman whose presence gives the narrator a fragile sense of hope.
- The cost of art Consider what it means to risk your body for words you believe must last.
Who will love it
For readers who love close, strange portraits of a single mind, and anyone curious about the roots of modern fiction. Pride, poverty and the struggle to write meet in a young writer’s shifting thoughts and moods.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A young writer starves in Kristiania
- Pride stops him from asking for help
- Hunger bends his mind and his senses
- Strange kindness and sudden cruelty
- Ylajali and the pull of hope
- What the book is about and how it speaks
Who’s who
- The narratorA nameless young writer in Kristiania who lives on his articles and his pride, and wants to prove his talent while he starves.
- YlajaliA young woman the narrator meets and names himself. She becomes a symbol of hope and warmth, just beyond his reach.
- Editors and newspaper menThe people who buy or refuse the narrator's pieces and so hold the key to his small income.
- Landladies and shopkeepersOrdinary city people to whom the narrator owes money or favors, and before whom he tries to keep up appearances.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
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- Audiobook
- 7 h 35 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 8 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
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Read and hear Hunger in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Hunger
by Knut Hamsun · 1890
A young writer walks Kristiania’s streets, trying to sell a few words as hunger shakes his sense of who he is.
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In short
Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, published in 1890. Hamsun knew poverty well.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A young writer starves in Kristiania
The story opens in Kristiania, which the narrator calls a strange city that leaves its mark on everyone who lives there. He is a young man with no name given to the reader. He lives by writing short pieces for the newspapers, and he has not sold one for a long time. When the story begins he wakes early in a rented room, already hungry, and he is already behind with his rent.
He is not a fool or a drunk. He is educated, sensitive and full of ideas. He believes that one good article could change his luck, and sometimes he writes one. But the money from a sale is soon gone, and the long days of nothing come back. The reader learns quickly that this is a cycle, not a single crisis.
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What is Hunger by Knut Hamsun about?
It follows a young, unnamed writer in Kristiania who tries to live on newspaper articles and slowly starves. The book shows his pride, shifting moods and strange behavior as hunger works on his mind.
Is Hunger a true story?
It is a novel, published in 1890, but Hamsun drew on his own years of poverty and hardship. The narrator is not Hamsun himself, yet the hunger and the struggle to write come from lived experience.
Where and when is Hunger set?
It is set in Kristiania, the old name for Oslo, in the late nineteenth century. The streets, parks, cheap lodgings and shops of the city form the background for every scene.
The author
Knut Hamsun
1859–1952 · Norwegian novelist
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a Norwegian novelist. He lived in Norway and spent periods in the United States during the 1880s. He published Hunger in 1890, Pan in 1894, and Growth of the Soil in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.
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