It's about Faust and the devil, Scandinavian painting and death, Russian gas stations and the American prairie: the essayistic is a driving force in Karl Ove Knausgård's literary work, his award-winning novels are unthinkable without essayistic insertions, in which the big questions about human existence are combined with the everyday lives of his protagonists. Knausgard's interests are wide-ranging, the big in the small is always sought and negotiated, and supposedly trivial things often turn out to be the actual essentials. What are the conditions for creative work - and what is it that shapes our world and ultimately our perception? These are the questions around which his writing revolves and which he approaches in various ways. In this collection of his most important texts, which have been compiled especially for German readers, we accompany Karl Ove Knausgard on a journey through America and to an operating theatre in Albania, gain insights into the Norwegian mentality, painting and literature, among other things - and witness what drives him to write novels and to try again and again to to look behind the inexplicable mechanisms of life.