[[The following is a translation of an article published in Dagbladet on June 6, 2015. The original (in Norwegian) can be found here.]]

Karl Ove Knausgård comes out with four new books.

Four years after his last My Struggle book, Karl Ove Knausgård is done with a new project. This fall not one but two books are coming out. And in the spring of next year, he will release two more.

The four book series will be published by Oktober Forlag, the same publishing house that put out the My Struggle books. the first, which comes out this September is titled “On Fall.”

“It began partially as a kind of letter to the child we were then expecting, where I described the world she would soon be born into, our life here and everything else that happened. At that time I was asked by an American magazine to write a short text for every issue over the course of a year,” he says and elaborates:

“I began on it but the editor quit, so I just continued to write and eventually the two projects melted together, so I ended up writing a text every day, throughout the next year which I still do – and so we decided to put it all together in four volumes – a book for each season” writes Knausgård in an e-mail to Dagbladet.

Not novels

Knausgård has released several essay collections the last few years, but this is something entirely different.

“I do not want to call them novels, but they are certainly literature” says the new publishing house editor, Ingeri Engelstad, who is looking forward to publishing the books.

In a discussion with his permanent editor Geir Gulliksen Knausgård writes that they would be “a personal encyclopedia on everything from chewing gum to stars, an attempt to approach the world of materiality, where everything seems to insist on having a charged and ambiguous meaning.”

Not fiction

The child he wrote to in the book is his fourth, a little girl who was born about a year ago.

You have recently said that you are finished writing literature after My Struggle. What got you to change your mind?

The new books are not fiction. On the contrary, they try to explore the world as it is . I am completely uninterested in what genre what I write belongs to, whether they are articles , essays, letters, commentaries, or as in this case, short texts about material reality. I write about the world. So I have at least partly kept my word!”

What do you think fans of My Struggle will think about your book?

“Are there any My Struggle fans left, though?” responds Knausgård.

“I thought everyone was tired of me and my books many years ago . But rule number one for a writer is not to think of the reader. I have not done so this time either. But my mother read it and she liked it in any case,” says Knausgård.

Expects nothing

He has recently come back to Sweden after a long tour in America, in connection with the release of the fourth volume of My Struggle there. The mammoth work has made him big name internationally and the last volume went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list.

“These books will certainly be published abroad, but it is not exactly Dan Brown, this stuff, so I don’t expect anything” he says.

Each of the four books will be approximately 200 pages with illustrations. On Fall will be illustrated by the Norwegian artist Vanessa Baird.

“I love her images, some of them reach a mythological depth that I have hardly seen elsewhere and they are disturbing in enormously fruitful ways. I had no other candidate than her. So it was wonderful that she said yes!” says Knausgård.