Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Blindfold | 1992 |
| The Enchantment of Lily Dahl | 1996 |
| What I Loved | 2003 |
| The Sorrows of an American | 2008 |
| The Summer Without Men | 2011 |
| The Blazing World | 2014 |
| Memories of the Future | 2019 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Reading to You | 1983 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Yonder | 1998 |
| Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting | 2005 |
| A Plea for Eros | 2005 |
| The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves | 2009 |
| Living, Thinking, Looking | 2012 |
| A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women | 2016 |
| The Delusions of Certainty | 2017 |
| Mothers, Fathers, and Others | 2021 |
| Ghost Stories: A Memoir | 2026 |
About Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is an American novelist and essayist, born in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1955. She is the author of seven novels, including “What I Loved” (2003) and “The Blazing World” (2014), along with a book of poetry, several essay collections and other works of non-fiction. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
The daughter of an American professor and a Norwegian mother, Hustvedt grew up speaking English and Norwegian and spent a school year at the Cathedral School in Bergen. She took a history degree at St. Olaf College in 1977, moved to New York the following year and completed a PhD in English at Columbia University in 1986, with a dissertation on Charles Dickens. Her first published work was a poem in The Paris Review, and a small collection of poems, “Reading to You”, came out with Station Hill Press in the early 1980s.
She turned to prose after finishing her doctorate. Two of the four stories that became her first novel, “The Blindfold” (1992), appeared in literary magazines and were chosen for Best American Short Stories in 1990 and 1991. A section of the book was later filmed by the French director Claude Miller. “What I Loved”, the novel she is best known for, is narrated by Leo Hertzberg, a New York art historian, and follows his friendship with the artist Bill Wechsler and the ties between their two families. It won the Prix des libraires du Quebec and, like “The Summer Without Men” (2011), was an international bestseller.
“The Blazing World” was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Her most recent novel is “Memories of the Future” (2019). In the same year she received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.
Alongside the fiction, Hustvedt writes essays on visual art, philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. “The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves” is an account of her own seizure disorder, and “Mysteries of the Rectangle” gathers her essays on painting. In 2015 she was appointed a lecturer in psychiatry at the Weill medical school of Cornell University.
Hustvedt met the writer Paul Auster in 1981 and married him the following year. They lived in Brooklyn until his death in 2024, and their daughter is the singer and actress Sophie Auster. Her memoir “Ghost Stories”, published in May 2026, covers their 43 years together and includes the last pages Auster wrote.
Photo: Luigi Novi, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).