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Henning Næs

Literary critic in MODERN TIMES.

An anti-authoritarian elitist

PHILOSOPHY: Pure nihilism? If one is to write a book about Zapffe, one should come to grips with his nihilism. Dag O. Hessen has chosen here to depict the philosopher's life as rich, despite the dark undertones.

A rational optimism?

THE STORY: What, for example, could the end of slavery mean for our dependence on fossil fuels? What can historical examples of successful coexistence between different ethnic groups, or the rise of the art of printing, tell us today?

The history of the notebook

WRITING: Roland Allen's book A History of Thinking on Paper is a history of the intellectual journey from the thought to the writing hand.

Shameless wealth of knowledge

JOURNAL: Are journals as part of the literary public at risk of being erased? The probing criticism, the one that dares to be independent literature, dares to be self-referential, introspective and self-implicating.

The actual nature

ECOLOGY: Ove Jacobsen has created an overview of 55 different green thinkers. In the book we can read that we must move from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective – so that solidarity, cooperation and compassion include all forms of life.

The Other – as a suffering being?

PHILOSOPHY: Wolfram Eilenberger describes here the struggle four philosophers – Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil fought to become independent people. The book succeeds well in putting them in context with the current events they got involved in and at the same time tried to get out of.

The global cloud capitalism

CAPITALISM: 'Techno-feudalism' is a global expansion with an all-consuming, limitless development of non-material phenomena. Here, social democracy can no longer make any difference, according to Yanis Varoufakis in this book.

Living is quite a strange thing

WRITING: Murakami is charismatic without seeming pedantic. A mental training diary?

To lose all hope?

HOPE: The good or reasonable hope is to hope for something that lies within the limits of possibility.