Hunger

An unnamed young writer walks the streets of Kristiania with nothing in his stomach and nothing in his pockets, pawning his waistcoat, inventing names and histories for strangers, refusing charity out of pride and then begging for it an hour later. Hamsun tracks the mind hour by hour as starvation warps it into euphoria, rage, and hallucination, and he declines to explain or excuse any of it. There is barely a plot, which was the point. When it appeared in 1890 it broke with the social novel entirely and handed the coming century a new way to write consciousness. Kafka, Hemingway, and Henry Miller all read it closely. Free PDF and EPUB edition available to download.