An excerpt from the novel was published in The New Yorker in 2004 under the title The Last Words on Earth. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss’s stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength. The History of Love: A Novel is the 2005 novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss.The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the 2008 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for fiction. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies young women’s coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.

In one of her most accomplished books yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed in all relationships from the very beginning of time. This successful work, along with the rest of Krauss's writing, is often compared to that of her similarly successful novelist/ex-husband, Jonathan Safran Foer. A dazzling collection of short fiction in which “one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” ( New York Times) explores what it means to be in a couple in these turbulent and unpredictable times. This tale of a tangle of livesThe History of Loveis Nicole Krauss's highly decorated second book, a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into over two dozen languages.

The history of love by nicole krauss