Siri Hustvedt Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Siri Hustvedt is a literary fiction author from Minessota that has made her name writing novels. Nonetheless, even she has also published poetry and collections of essays and short stories.

The author was born in the small town of Northfield to Lloyd Hustvedt an American father and Ester Vegan Hustvedt a Norwegian mother. The author spent much of her early life in Minnesota and attended local schools in Northfield.
While her mother stayed at home taking care of the children, the father was working a the St Olaf College library teaching literature and Norwegian.

Hustvedt’s father would later become a high-ranking member of the Norwegian American Historical Association. The position granted him access to a huge archive of books, immigrant letters, recipes, documents, newspapers, and diaries.
He would ultimately publish the biography of Norwegian American publisher and scholar Rasmus Bjorn Anderson.

For his work, he would win the McKnight Prize for Literature in 1966. He would also become recognized as one of the most significant contributors to the preservation of the history of Norwegian immigrants to the US.

Hustvedt visited Norway the country of her father in 1959 when her mother decided it was time that she and Liv her sister spent one of their summers there.

They would go back there in 1968 and lived in Bergen, studying at the Rudolph Steiner School where she studied the Sagas. She used to read a lot during this time and started writing stories and poetry while still in high school.
After living in Reykjavik for a few years, Siri went back to Bergen to live with her aunt and her husband and attend the Cathedral School. She would then go back to the US to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in history from Olaf College.
Thereafter, she worked as a bartender, and with some money saved, she got a fellowship studying English at Columbia University.

Working all manner of odd jobs from artist’s studio assistant, department store model, and waitress, she continued studying at Columbia until she published her debut poem in the Paris Review in 1981.

Soon after publishing her poem, she met her future husband while attending a New York poetry reading and the two would get married in 1982.

She got her doctorate in identity and language in Dickens in 1986 and these themes have continued to occupy both her fiction and nonfiction works to date.

After she graduated with her doctorate degree, Sir Hustvedt began working on the manuscript for “Blindfold” her first fiction novel. Two sections would at first be published as short stories in literary magazines.
It would ultimately be published in 1992 under the American publishing house Poseidon Press. It was so popular that would finally be translated into more than seventeen languages.

Over the years, she would publish several more works with many becoming international bestsellers. Her novel “The Blazing World” made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize and was the winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction by the Los Angeles Times.
In 1995, she began writing about art when Karen Wright who was known for publishing “Modern Painters” gave her a painting from the National Gallery in Washinton.

Later on, she also got into neuroscience and psychoanalysis mostly because she has always been interested in psychiatry, neurology, and psychoanalysis since her childhood.

She would then publish a nonfiction work on psychology titled “The Shaking Women.” She has also lectured on philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and literature at international conferences.
She continues to write both nonfiction and fiction works in addition to her lectures.

Siri Hustvedt’s novel “The Summer Without Men,” tells of Mia Fredrickson the vituperative, wry, and tragicomic narrator. After three decades of marriage, she has to reexamine her life when her husband out of the blue asks for a pause.
Her husband is a famous neuroscientist who it seems has been planning this for a while but kept everything under wraps for months. The request catches her off guard and she soon finds herself in a psychiatric ward.

When she is released from the hospital a few months later, she is taken back to the small town where she had spent much of her childhood. Alone in a very large house that she has rented, she fumes, rages, and bemoans her fate.
However, she is being drawn slowly but surely into the lives of the people around her including her mother and several of her closest friends. She is also getting closer to a young neighbor who is married to an angry loud husband and has two young children.
Recently, she made friends with some adolescent girls who have been known to have a penchant for petty cruelty and scheming.

It makes for a revelatory, witty, and provocative novel about marriage, love, and the age-old question of difference and sameness between the sexes.

“The Blazing World” by Siri Hustvedt is a work set in New York that tells of Harriet “Harry” Burden, a woman of incredible intellect and also an obscure artist.

For years she has lived under the shadow of her husband who is a well-known and rich art collector. But when the man unexpectedly dies, she feels a sense of emancipation and her brain suddenly is full of all manner of ideas.
She believes many of her previous creative works did not get the critical acclaim they deserved and sets out to change things up.

She enlists three male artists and exhibits her works using their names and soon enough, the men are getting a lot of lavish praise for their spectacular exhibitions.
However, this scheme comes at a cost, as even though she has had a lot of success, when she finally reveals that she was involved hardly anyone believes her.
Things take an even darker turn when one of her artists goes rogue resulting in tragic consequences.

It is an ingenious story that compiles extracts from Harriet’s journals, interviews with her friends and family, and critic reviews.

Siri Hustvedt’s work “The Sorrows of an American” is the story of Erik Davidsen and Inga his sister who just discovered some disturbing notes in their father’s things. The note was written by a mysterious unknown woman to their deceased father.
They believe that the latter may have been involved in a bizarre death. When they come back to New York after attending their father’s funeral, they continue to investigate the mystery of the note they found.

Erik has developed an emotional vulnerability to his psychiatric patients and is fascinated with his new tenants his sister Inga is dealing with the attention of a journalist who says he knows some secrets about her deceased father.
With the unfolding of each mystery, Erik begins to identify with the secret life of his father and begins to understand his impoverished childhood.

How war shaped how his father interacted with him and his siblings, and The Depression, even as his sister Ingac confronts the reality of the double life of her husband.

It is a novel about children and fathers, blindness and recognition, deafness and listening, the pain of keeping silent, and the pain of speaking the ambiguities of recovery, illness, loneliness, and memory.