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| Written as a series of letters to the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausggard, Dear Knausgaard is both a heartfelt celebration of the act of reading and a compelling feminist critique of My Struggle, Knausgaard's 6-volume autobiographical novel. |
literary criticism, 194 pp
Fiction Advocate (US edition), 2020
Boiler House Press (UK edition), 2022
"Kim Adrian's loving struggle with Knausgaard is the kind of criticism I most enjoy — personal, wonderfully engaged, intense but somehow simultaneously light-footed, and extremely intelligent. The brilliance of her feminist critique is that it acutely exposes vulnerabilities in Knausgaard's male universalism while affectionately acknowledging the scope and appeal of his inevitably gendered voice. A delight from start to finish."
—James Wood, literary critic for The New Yorker
“On display is a rigorous mind, a fiery intellect, a curious and engaged reader.”
—The Boston Globe
“If you’re seeking a heady, thoughtful response to a heady, thoughtful multi-volume work — well, we have a recommendation for you.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Intriguing . . . Adrian’s dynamic work of both literary and self-analysis will appeal to those passionate readers who have vacillated between adoring certain authors and wanting to throw their books across the room.”
—Publisher's Weekly
"I can’t pin it down, this spirit I can’t find any prior evidence of. If she’s borrowing a form, Adrian returns it, so far as I can tell, utterly unrecognizable, either dissolved or reinvented . . . I don’t know how she does it."
—Essay Daily
Amazon Boiler House Press
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| A daughter's struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone, an intimate portrait of the chaos and confusion of a mother's mental illness, and a deep meditation on storytelling itself. Written in the form of a glossary. |
The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet
memoir, 304 pp
University of Nebraska Press, 2018
Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist
“Deceptively simple fragments add up to more than the sum of their parts. . . . Astonishing and inventive. [Adrian's] glossary is strangely gripping, with a momentum pulling the reader in and through. The result is whimsical, even darkly funny at times, brimming with compassion, terribly sad and deeply loving. Memoir readers should not miss this singular offering.”
—Shelf Awareness
“This ambitious memoir glints with poetry and wisdom. . . . Aching, endless, unresolved, and extremely compelling. . . . [Adrian's] glossary, in making a place for everything, has provided a way through this harrowing tale of the toll of generational trauma . . . with generosity, honesty, and insight.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Details, with precision, sensitivity, and lyricism, the specialized language of a childhood and adulthood with an alcoholic father and a mother with a catalog of emotional problems. The [glossary] form imposes a semblance of order, is an attempt at understanding, and blazes with harrowing moments. . . . An intimate and searching accumulation of the moments, tender and brutal, that heap together and create a life.”
—The Boston Globe
“Adrian’s unique approach to narrating a story that resists order is to transform it into glossary entries. . . . Some of the entries are long and provide pages of narrative, others are brief like a punch.”
—Signature Reads
“Adrian uses a highly unconventional form to mirror her confusion over how to connect her wide-ranging, frequently painful memories of what she and her sister endured . . . creating deep connections between the reader and her childhood self.”
—Hippocampus
“The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is an unconventional, wildly disturbing, and hugely innovative book. It is an intimate portrait of family dysfunction, addiction, and mental illness that grabs the reader immediately. The story is told in razor-sharp vignettes. . . crisp and wide-eyed.”
—The Florida Review
“A remarkable rendering of a mother-daughter relationship . . . sprinkled with evocative memories, at turns hilarious, repulsive, poetic, and devastating. The form of the glossary works neatly as a conduit for cataloguing the way memory works in our consciousness, popping up unexpectedly and without a need for chronology. . . The text is challenging because of the subject matter [but] Adrian weaves pathos and humor throughout. ”
—Propeller Books
Amazon Nebraska Bookshop
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| Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies—vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed—and along the way reveals extraordinary secrets hiding in this most ordinary of objects. |
cultural criticism, 144 pp
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House (Chinese translation), 2021
“An utterly engaging investigation — not so much of [the sock], per se, as of human evolution, anatomy, physics, sexuality, fashion, painting, consumerism, manufacturing, and motherhood. . . . Illuminating, erudite, deeply intelligent.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Sock reflects on the brilliance present in the minutiae of our lives. With piercing wit, idiosyncratic humor and sharply insightful moments of personal examination, Adrian uses the most domestic of items as a lens through which to view the inelegance and wondrousness of humanity.”
—Shelf Awareness
“If a book called Sock makes you think, 'Twenty-five-thousand words on socks? Uh, no,' then you’re unclear on the concept. You’re also missing out on a thoroughly delightful discussion.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“What a treat! . . . This slim little marvel of trivia and attention to the overlooked . . . was a near-religious experience for me.”
—Pages of Julia
“A remarkable read, a perfectly satisfying balance of fact and quirk and charm.”
—Knitty.com
Barnes & Noble Amazon Bloomsbury
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| A ground-breaking collection of "hermit crab essays" (essays that borrow the forms of such ordinary, everyday things as recipes, police reports, and crossword puzzles). Often cited as a foremost example of the genre. |
The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms
anthology (edited and with an Introduction by Kim Adrian), 276 pp
University of Nebraska Press, 2018
“This book is the science fiction of creative nonfiction, or better yet, the Ulysses of the modern essay . . . it makes readers feel as if they are learning what an essay is (or could be) all over again.”
—New Pages
"The essays in this collection bring with them a sense of hope about literature and its capacity for evolution and change."
—The Millions
"If good creative writing sparks the instinct to write, The Shell Game provides ample embers to inspire a wide range of writers. . . Anyone from the expert essayist, lay reader, or a teacher looking for an evocative anthology will find something of value in these pages."
—Columbia Journal
"The Shell Game may serve to expand what readers think of when they think of the essay."
—Punctuate Magazine
“Kim Adrian’s introduction demonstrates the potential and beauty of the hermit crab approach.”
—Literary Journalism Studies
"If you were to recommend this book to others, you’d likely tell them to savor it, make it last: tell them that they should not 'binge-read' it, but rather treat themselves with a new form each day until they’ve read the last one."
—Hippocampus Magazine
"This collection can be returned to again and again, as the reading mind grows . . . The Shell Game makes a unique and significant contribution."
—Split Rock Review
Amazon Nebraska Bookshop
SELECTED SHORT WORKS:
The Gettysburg Review
Notable Essay, Best American Essays 2020
At the little sushi restaurant near my husband’s new office, I fish a flat sliver of ice out of my water glass and rub it against the inside of my wrist. David asks how a person can get carpel tunnel from reading a book, and I take the final installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel My Struggle out of my backpack to show him, again, how thick it is.
"Mostly it happened at the beginning. When all the weight was in my right hand."
"Mostly it happened at the beginning. When all the weight was in my right hand."
Tin House
Once, about eight or nine years ago, I caught a glimpse of some wild red currants growing by the side of the road. The road traced the spine of a rolling, lightly wooded hill in West Virginia; my husband and I were on our way home from a wedding, and he was driving—forty, maybe fifty miles an hour—while I half dozed in the passenger seat. But my eyes must have been at least partially open, because I saw the berries dangling behind a thin screen of leaves and branches, glowing in a reaching bit of sunshine. And when I saw them, I felt some enormous thing—a feeling, you could call it for the sake of convenience, though it seemed much more than that—quickly rise in me and then, just as quickly, evaporate.
New World Writing
To the novice, the craft of knitting can seem a fussy and bewildering thing, but really, even fairly complex patterns are doable with nothing more than patience, diligence, and a modicum of skill. Still, one must always approach the activity of knitting with a keen sense of adventure. As one of the nicotine-infused salesladies who work at my local yarn shop once told me (disgusted by another customer’s fear of improvisation), “Knitting is all about taking chances!”
Agni
What is consciousness? Is it in your head or is it something your head encounters? Is it in the world itself, can you touch it? Or does it touch you? Our brains are matter, of course, like rocks, or stars, or like that stick of butter melting in the sun on my kitchen counter. Our brains are things. Soft and greyish. Bumpy. They say electrical impulses carry our thoughts and these impulses jump from synapse to synapse. Sometimes deep paths are worn over long trails of synapses, and these constitute habitual thought, like rote memories or those odd connections that haunt you on a regular basis. For example, say there’s a certain stop sign at a certain street corner with a certain sticker on it with the name of a certain band that, for no reason you can think of, reminds you each and every time of your mother’s garden.
Seneca Review
Chinese translation in 作家 (Writer Magazine)
In college I knew a boy who walked funny, and a wrestler with golden ringlets, and a Greek boy who danced like an angel, and I knew a boy whose mother killed herself with a heavy-duty electrical extension cord. I knew other boys in college, too, but for some reason these are the four I still occasionally remember with affection despite the fact that, in reality, I never actually got to know any of them all that well. To tell the truth, I don’t even remember most of their names.
Michegan Quarterly Review
Distinguished Story, Best American Short Stories 2014
One of the strangest memories I own is of wandering around an old-fashioned carnival, complete with the smells of popcorn, cotton candy, and oily, meat-scented smoke; there were games of chance, amusement rides, and dozens of bicolor tents housing such spectacles as the Strong Man, the Fat Lady, and the Bearded Girl. I must have been ten or eleven years old at the time, and on one side of me was my sister, holding my right hand, on the other was Darin, holding my left. Darin was the little boy who belonged to the woman who was supposed to be babysitting us—my sister and me—but who really, more often than not, left all three of us in front of the TV while she took naps and ran errands.
ABOUT:
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| photo credit: Benoit Cortet |
LISTEN +/-
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INTERVIEWS: ★
Publisher's Weekly ★
Los Angeles Review of Books
★
Washington Independent Review of Books ★
Tin House
★
Barnstorm Literary Journal
★
Essay Daily
★
The Florida Review
★
Punctuate Magazine
★ The Leaving Years: A Blog for Errant Readers ★ New World Writing (scroll down for interview) ★ IN CONVERSATION: 'Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy (with Anna Leahy)
Public Books ★ On Writing the (Short) Nonfiction Book: A Conversation, in
Poets & Writers ★ Containing the Hidden Lives of Ordinary Things: A Conversation with Seven Authors, in
Assay Journal ★ ON CRAFT: On Listening to What Our Nonfiction is Trying to Tell Us, in
Literary Hub ★ Kim Adrian Recommends, in
Poets & Writers ★ How Does Your Art’s Subject Shape the Process of Making It?, in
ArtSake ★
CONTACT:
E-MAIL: INSTAGRAM: @kim_adrian_
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EVENTS:
UPCOMING:
Guest Speaker, “Self and Sequence: The Lyric Diary.” Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), July 25-26, 2025. More info HERE.
SELECTED PAST +/-
★ 01.16.25 Auto/Bio/Fiction series GOLDSMITH'S UNIVERSITY ★ 07.11.23 WHIPPLE FELLOWSHIP Visiting Artist ★ 09.27.22 WHEATON COLLEGE Visiting Artist ★ 07.03.22 Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, SCHWANDORF, Germany Residency Studio Open House ★04.11.21 University of Hartford CARDIN READING SERIES ★ 10.02.21 HAYSTACK BOOK FESTIVAL Featured Reader ★ 06.10.21 Boston LITCRAWL "The Art of Writing About Reading" ★ 11.29.18
University of New Hampshire, UNH WRITERS' SERIES, Featured Reader ★ 11.03.18 NonfictioNOW Conference - PHOENIX Panel Lead: "Writing the Hermit Crab Essay" ★ 06.02.17 NonfictioNOW Conference - REYKJAVIK, Iceland Panel Lead: “Microhistories: Writing Deeply About Narrow Subjects” ★
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