The Books Briefing: The Many Sides of Loneliness

I’m alone now much more than I used to be. I cook alone, work alone, and occasionally walk alone. The pandemic has limited my social life and forced me into a period of isolation, just as it has for so many others. Sometimes this solitude feels like a restorative pause; other times it just feels lonely.

Literature can capture the breadth of these (excluding one encounter with a passerby) in . In the fictional , the novelist Nicolai Houm also follows a solitary character—this time a creative-writing professor who ends up . In other books, writers explore more uncommon experiences with aloneness. Ruminative works that combine elements of fiction and memoir by writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Chris Kraus feature narrators who . The novelist by focusing on their uniqueness—all the factors that make them different from others.