A series of warm and often funny letters offer a heartfelt celebration of the act of reading and a compelling feminist critique of the 6-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Boiler House Press, 2022
Literary Criticism, 160 pages
Originally published in the U.S. by Fiction Advocate, 2020
An SPD Bestseller
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"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, staff writer and book critic for The New Yorker
“The letters are intimate ... erudite, and often funny. On display is a rigorous mind, a fiery intellect, a curious and engaged reader. Adrian brings lofty ideas — questions of attention and meaning, of the troubling permeability between inside and outside, of reality itself — down to the meat-and-feeling human level. The book ends up being about ... what it means to read, to think, to allow oneself to be not just moved by a piece of art, but altered by it.”—The Boston Globe
“[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.” —Publishers Weekly
★
The chronicle of 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.
University of Nebraska Press, 2018
Memoir, 304 pages
Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist, Memoir
A Poets & Writers New and Noteworthy Read
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“This ambitious memoir glints with poetry and wisdom. . . . Aching, endless, unresolved, and extremely compelling.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“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
“An intimate and searching accumulation of the moments, tender and brutal, that heap together and create a life.” —The Boston Globe
“A stunning merger of form and content; a remarkable portrait-becomes-self-portrait.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
★
A close examination of the humble sock reveals extraordinary secrets hiding in this most ordinary of objects and, along the way, reintroduces us to our own bodies: vulnerable, miraculous, and a little absurd.
Bloomsbury, 2017
Cultural Criticism, 144 pages
Chinese edition published by Shanghai Literary Arts, translated by Shao Jingy
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“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
“A thoroughly delightful discussion.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“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
★
A collection of thirty-three lyric essays that borrow their forms from ordinary, everyday sources—such as recipes, police reports, and crossword puzzles. Edited and with an introduction by Kim Adrian.
University of Nebraska Press, 2018
Anthology (editor), 276 pages
In The Millions Hall of Fame
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“The Shell Game pushes the boundaries of prose and opens up a whole new world. . . . 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
“Kim Adrian’s introduction demonstrates the potential and beauty of the hermit crab approach as she lays out the history of the metaphor using kingdom, phyla, species, etc., to identify the literary heritage and taxonomy of the hermit crab essay itself. . . . Her introduction, as lyrical as it is, is often laugh-out-loud funny.” —Literary Journalism Studies
★
A portrait made of absence, white space and silence, where the unanswered questions speak as loudly as the answers might have.
IKE: a Publishing Project, 2026
Essay Chapbook, 48 pages
"Questionnaire for My Grandfather" has also been translated into Mandarin by Ping Zu for the Chinese Yangtze River Series.
PURCHASE
From the publisher's catalog:
"Questionnaire for My Grandfather is a quietly devastating essay that uses the structure of a questionnaire to interrogate what can—and cannot—be known about a man who shaped [the author's] family’s history. Each prompt becomes a doorway into memory, silence, and inherited mystery, revealing how the stories we tell about our elders are often built from fragments, omissions, and the emotional residue they leave behind.
The essay is a vessel for grief, curiosity, and intergenerational reckoning. It is a portrait assembled through negative space, where the unanswered questions speak as loudly as the answers might have."