What is happiness in an age of packaged needs and liberated desires? Lars Gustafsson's Stories of Happy People is a collection of ten short fictions that maps the range of contentment, from inner joy to the edges of despair. Uncle Sven and the Cultural Revolution finds a politically indifferent Swedish research engineer, in Mao's China as an industrial consultant, surprised by his own imagination. The Four Railroads of Iserlohn lead to poignant, illusionary journeyings. The half-felt yearnings of displaced intellectuals, trying to break out of the stasis of their existence, are explored in The Art of Surviving November, What Does Not Kill Us, Tends to Make Us Stronger, and The Fugitives Discover That They Knew Nothing. A Water Story is a sketch of the elusive staying power of love. The protected, private universes of the mentally retarded, the insane, and the senile are opened to view in Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases, The Bird in the Breast, and Out of the Pain. In all of these stories, Gustafsson, one of Sweden's leading men of letters and philosophical writer par excellence, places lives of seeming smallness within the wider context of the culture and history of our hapless era.

In his newest novel, A Tiler's Afternoon, Lars Gustafsson invites us to share a day's work with Torsten Bergman, an aging, semi-retired tile-layer. On this particular day, Torsten arrives at an empty suburban villa, partially renovated and left unfinished. A master craftsman, he knows what to do and goes about his business, all the while reminiscing over his past, considering what may be left of his future, daydreaming about the mysterious Sophie K., the absent occupant of the villa's upstairs flat. No one checks on the work. With the close of the day comes Torsten's growing unease over hours spent on perhaps futile labor. But at that moment there was a loud knocking at the door - no, more of a pounding than a knocking. It sounded as if by some strange coincidence the whole world had come to life again and was trying to get in. Like Samuel Beckett, Lars Gustafsson turns the plainest of circumstances into poignant universals. There are yet roads to travel after we say we cannot go on.

Lars Gustafsson, one of Sweden's leading men of letters, is known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels and short stories, but he is also a distinguished poet with ten discrete volumes published to date in addition to the collective edition of his work for the years 1950-1980. In The Stillness of the World Before Bach: New Selected Poems, readers will recognize in Gustafsson's verse the playful erudition and imaginative philosophizing that give his fiction its unique appeal. Gustafsson, writes editor Christopher Middleton, has remained distinctively a poet, insofar as his novels and essays usually combine exploratory and fabulous features with keen observation, a fascination with character in conflict as the subjective (or existential) axis of history, and a delight in story for its own complex or simple sake. The selections for The Stillness of the World Before Bach were made by Christopher Middleton of the University of Texas at Austin in close association with the author, with whom he also collaborated for his own versions of many of the poems. Other translations were contributed by Robin Fulton, Philip Martin Yvonne L. Sandstroem, and Harriett Watts.

This imaginative novel suggests the possibility of parallel lives. In part one, Bernard Foy is a young American Rabbi, caught up in a ruthless game of international intrigue and espionage. In Part Two, he is a lecherous 83-year-old poet and member of the Swedish Academy. And, in Part Three he is a brilliant, homicidal juvenile delinquent--perhaps writing about the other two. Or maybe all three Berard Foys are conceived of in a beehive within a skull, lodged deep in a Swedish forest. Although Swedish, Gustafsson spends most of the year at the University of Texas, Austin.

Lars Gustafsson is one of Sweden's leading and most prolific men of letters; a poet, philosopher, and fiction writer with dozens of books to his credit since his literary debut, at the age of twenty, in 1956. Although known in the English-speaking world primarily for his novels, Gustafsson is nevertheless one of the most frequently translated of contemporary Swedish poets. Elegies and Other Poems is a companion volume to The Stillness of the World before Bach (New Directions, 1988). As in that earlier volume, editor Christopher Middleton has made his selection from several of the poet's books and included his own translations as well as those of others, Yvonne Sandstroem, Bill Brookshire, and Philip Martin. Readers of Gustafsson's fiction will recognize in his verse the elegant mix of intellect and sheer play, the ruminations of a mind that apprehends humanity in the riddles of the universe.

Lars Gustafsson's Funeral Music for Freemasons (1983), the Swedish writer's fifth book of fiction to be translated into English, follows the lives of three free spirits of the 1950s, from their aspiring student years in Stockholm to their present realities, so different from their youthful imaginings. Jan Bohman, a brilliant poet become smalltime African merchant--a latterday Rimbaud--is about to be deported from Senegal. Hans (Hasse to his friends), an idealistic research physicist, is now a professor at Harvard, leading the protected surburban life of an American academic. Ann-Marie Nöhme, the promising Mozartean soprano in the bonds of whose love both men agonized, has had a failed career in a provincial repertory. How could so much talent have come to so little? Was there something in the Sweden of their youth, and by extension the whole of the industrial West, that prefigured the death of creativity? Or might it have been spent, drained away in love's passion? Then again, perhaps these years never did in fact happen, memory following one time-line, existence another, so that their real lives seem to have gone unlived. With his customary psychological delicacy and philosophical aplomb, Lars Gustafsson has composed a novel in Funeral Music for Freemasons that, like the Mozart Trauermusik the title invokes, sings a moving dirge for an age.

Poet, novelist, and philosopher Lars Gustafsson (1936-2016) was one of Europe's leading literary figures. Much of his writing is concerned with the search for moral consciousness and the relationship between personal experience and self-awareness, imbued with a philosophically founded scepticism toward language. His poetry is renowned for relating the metaphysical to the mundane with a particular clarity and precision, illuminating the potency of ordinary objects and everyday events as he addresses critical issues that have concerned great thinkers over the centuries. Introduction by Per Wåstberg. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Shortlisted for the Bernard Shaw Prize 2018 (for Translation from Swedish).

In the beginning of the winter thaw, Lars Lennart Westin has learned that he has cancer and will not live through spring. Told through the journals of this schoolteacher turned apiarist, The Death of a Beekeeper, is his gentle, courageous, and sometimes comic meditation on living with pain. Westin has refused to surrender the time left him to the impersonation of a hospital, preferring to take his fate upon himself, to continue solitary, reflective life in the Swedish countryside. I took little walks and noticed that in the last months the pain had actually colored the landscape in a peculiar way. Here and there is a tree where it really hurt, here and there is a fence against whose post I struck my hand in passing. His inner landscape is also re-forming: This constant concern with an indefinite dangerous secret in one's own body, this feeling that some dramatic change is taking place, without one's being able to have any clarity about what really is... reminds me of prepuberty. I even recognize this gentle feeling of shame again. The relentlessly intimate burning in his gut provides a point of psychic detachment, rendering his survival a unique art form whose level of difficulty is so high that no one exists who can practice it. Yet he insists, We begin again. We never give up.

Lars Gustafsson has an uncompromising vision of the utter complexity of modern life.--The New York Times Book Review

Gustafsson's A Time in Xanadu, his third translated collection of poems, manages to be personal and quirky while also deeply philosophical. --ForeWord

Few poets today can so easily without overwriting bridge 'centuries and minutes, ' to use the title of one of Gustafson's poems.--Harvard Review

From the moment it begins, Lars Gustafsson's A Time in Xanadu throws open questions of geography and narration. Where are we? How do we know? Throughout the book, the speaker's voice proves a powerful one as it muses on questions of travel, war, philosophy, and thought itself. The language of Gustafsson's poems is sparse, and his lines are compact and taut. But beneath the neat surfaces of these poems lie surreal and sometimes eerie landscapes: a castle in Cremona, Italy; those white, strangely meaningless / days between Christmas and New Year; a library which is a kind of subway. There are strains of Ezra Pound in this work, and allusions to great continental thinkers--Goethe, Fichte, Nietzsche, Einstein--drift across it. Yet tracing those allusions to their source is neither desirable nor, ultimately, possible. For in the wake of Gustafsson's highly evocative poems, we can only wonder just how much time we have spent, or lost, in Xanadu, or where we went from there.

The Khan leaves Xanadu and milk
from white goats only
is hurled high into the air on his departure
to nourish the spirits of the air.
So says Marco Polo,
our Venetian witness.

Lars Gustafsson is a renowned Swedish poet, novelist, and philosopher who has written dozens of books. He taught philosophy for many years at the University of Texas, Austin. He now lives in Sweden.

To readers familiar with Lars Gustafsson's work, the playful philosophizing of Sigsmund will come as no surprise, as he leisurely pulls together seeming fragments into a narrative of 1970s Berlin that at once looks back to Homer, Dante, and the Faust legend and ahead to space warfare and intergalactic travel, childhood memories of Sweden, Marxist-Leninism, sports competition, art, epistemology, daydreams--nothing is excluded from the purview of Gustafsson's lighthearted humanism. And behind it all broods the restless spirit of the author's alter ego, the warring king, Sigismund III of Poland (d. 1632).

In Smile of the Midsummer Night, best-selling author Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist present a very personal guide to their Swedish homeland. Setting off from the far South, their journey takes them up to Norrland, from the farms of Scania to Laponian, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But it is the idyllic fjord in Bohul n, located in the V stmanland region, as well as M lar Lake and Stockholm that they call home. Throughout, Gustafsson and Blomqvist are full of entertaining suggestions for excursions, including journeys through forests and moors where you can take in the odd elk or wolf along the way and visits to August Strindberg's and Kurt Tucholsky's graves.

The first work of contemporary travel writing about Sweden by Swedish writers to have been translated into English, Smile of the Midsummer Night is a loving and poetic ode to this beautiful nation and a must-have for anyone interested in Scandinavia.

When poet/critic Lars Gustafsson was the editor of Bonniers Litterära Magasin, he was bombarded with the question, What makes a good poem? Forays into Swedish Poetry is his answer.

The fifteen poems in this volume range across the history of Swedish poetry from the 1640s, at the beginning of the Period of Great Power, to the late twentieth century. Poets as diverse as Skogekär Bergbo, Erik Johan Stagnelius, August Strindberg, and Vilhelm Ekelund are discussed from historical, psychological, and sociopolitical viewpoints. However, Gustafsson includes only those poems he considers excellent.

Each essay begins with a presentation of the poem both in Swedish and in English translation. Gustafsson's analyses are built upon his subjective experiences with poems and poets and upon a more objective structural approach that investigates the actual machinery of the poems. Thus, Gustafsson enlightens us with his always imaginative, sometimes daring analyses, and we learn a great deal about the critic himself in the process. One of his main concerns is what he calls, in his discussion of Edith Södergran, the very mysteriousness of human existence. Time and again, Gustafsson emphasizes the enigmatic, arcane aspects of life in his analyses. In contrast, his vocabulary and approach also bespeak a constant interest in science and technology.

In his introduction, Robert T. Rovinsky, the volume's translator, presents examples of Gustafsson's various thematic interests as voiced in his poems, several of which are translated here for the first time. While The Machines explores his theory of people as automatons and Conversation between Philosophers his linguistic pessimism, Gustafsson's work as a whole shows his enchantment with its major theme: the intrinsic mystery of life.