Mysteries

In a Norwegian coastal town, society’s carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. At once arrogant and unassuming, righteous and depraved, Nagel seduces the entire community even as he turns it on its head—before disappearing as suddenly as he arrived. Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) was a Norwegian novelist, poet, and playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Winner of the Nobel Prize In a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an unsparing and often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts and suppressed desires. At once arrogant and unassuming, righteous and depraved, sad and truly mad, Nagel seduces the entire community even as he turns it on its end—before disappearing as suddenly as he arrived. Mysteries includes an introduction by Sven Birkerts and an afterword by Isaac Bashevis Singer and has been called "one of the great seminal works of nineteenth-century European literature" by Raymond Rosenthal in the Saturday Review. "Mysteries is as immediate and haunting as last night's dreams (or nightmares)." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Hamsun, perhaps more than any other writer, prefigured the techniques and attitudes of modernism." —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek