Since the completion of his six-volume autobiographical series My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard has turned his attention outward, penning insightful yet unpretentious essays on a wide range of subjects. Illustrated throughout, the essays include Knaugaard's meditations on such artists as Rembrandt, Cindy Sherman, Sally Mann, Anselm Kiefer, and Francesca Woodman, while also considering Flaubert's Madame Bovary and the notebooks of Ingmar Bergman.

"[Knausgaard's] intense focus, formidable command of reference and tendency to see the interconnectedness of things make for highly stimulating, almost overwhelming reading…. The rhetorical effect is one of wisdom gained rather than merely delivered."—Washington Post