Now in paperback, The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can't afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms--fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters--to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn's book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that's hard to put down.--Politiken

An incredibly moving and gripping novel . . . so sure-footed, clear, vibrating, like chiffon or a cigarette. -- Olga Ravn

An incandescent debut about young adults learning how to care for themselves -- from within the limits of the psychiatric system

Perfect for fans of Tove Ditlevsen and devotees of Sylvia Plath

In honest, crackling investigations of the psychiatric system and the young people trying to find their way, Gråb l's soaring debut offers a critique of institutionalization and an urgent recalibrating of the language and conceptions of care.

I'm not inarticulate, but I leave language to the room around me, says Fine Gråb l's nameless narrator as she dreams of furniture flickering to life in the room she occupies at a temporary psychiatric care unit for young adults. A chair that greets you, or shiny tiles of floor that follow a peculiar grammar of their own. Our narrator is obsessed with the way items rise up out of their thingness, assuming personalities and private motives. She also cannot sleep, and practices her daily routines with the urgency of survival - peeling a carrot, drinking prune juice - all an acutely calibrated exploration into having a home.

Structured as a series of intimate vignettes like those of Olga Ravn, What Kingdom thrums with the swirling voices of this shared home. Hector blares Michael Jackson from the recreation room and recalls a past in Peru when his psychoses were treated with exorcism. The town would shake the devil out of his small, teenage body before he was relocated to Denmark. Or Marie, who has lived in the temporary unit since she was eighteen, has no idea that her mother lives just four floors below in a permanent care unit.

Echoing the aching writings of Janet Frame on electroconvulsive therapy, or Linda Boström Knausgård's mythical meditations on silence and mental health, Fine Gråb l renders a delicate and deep uncoupling from the world.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 ALTA FIRST TRANSLATION PRIZE

In the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, one summer in the 1970s, a family--a husband and wife, their daughter, and their crippled teenage son Camilo--take in an orphan named Cosme. The boys unexpectedly fall in love, but an act of violence shatters their intimate world and changes their lives forever. Decades later, when Camilo returns to his hometown, he is haunted by his first love and the long shadow of Brazil's military dictatorship. At once an incisive and unforgiving study of Brazilian society and a fluid, queer coming-of-age story, Victor Heringer's exhilarating and moving novel is worthy of Machado de Assis.

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity. It was shortlisted for the the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935-2009) remains one of Denmark's most distinguished and original authors. Natalja's Stories, modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron, takes an usual approach to the theme of migration by focusing on the shifting ground of meaning itself. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother--about her mother, abducted by a Russian from Copenhagen: taken to Russia, she tries to flee the Revolution; she dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. But the story is told and retold in marvelous ways, digressing playfully (often hilariously), and involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. Natalja's Stories springs surprise after surprise, and as one Danish critic put it: instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalizing account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else--offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on migrant fate as a tragic narrative.

Spurning carnal desire and earthly temptations all his life, the mystic Othlo is now in the care of his brother monks including the odious and semen-filled Wolkbart. Despite the spare walls which surround him, he frolics with Holy Dionysius in the Garden of Head-bearers (each carries his own head for eternity), descends from the island of Heaven, visits a brothel patronized by fallen angels, and witnesses the souls of the once gluttoinous wealthy fighting over scraps of rotting crabmeat in a ditch in Hell.

The third and final book in a series about mankind's desire to conquer nature, Visions and Temptations follows Awake and Sublunar. In each novel, a great if imperfect mind facesis failed by the inevitable demise of the body.

A great mind and a formidable personality, Brahe is also the world's most illustrious noseless man of his time. Told by Brahe and his assistants--a filthy cast of characters--Sublunar is both novel and almanac. Alongside sexual deviancy, spankings, ruminations on a new nose--flesh, wood, or gold?--Brahe (a choleric and capricious character) and his peculiar helpers (I would rather watch her globes tonight than icy stars) take painstainking measurements that will revolutionize astronomy, long before the invention of the telescope. Meanwhile the plague rages in Europe...
The second in Voetmann's triptych of historical novels, Sublunar is as visceral, absurd, and tragic as its predecessor Awake, but with a special nocturnal glow and a lunatic-edged gaze trained on the moon and the stars.

The Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen, a terrifying talent (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times).

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in midcentury Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of becoming free and happy--without ever truly understanding what that might mean.

Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark's most famous and beloved writers, and her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on republication in English, named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty. The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness, written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English, offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of this essential twentieth-century writer.

Delicately attuned to the complexities of both the natural world and human psychology, this potent classic of twentieth-century Danish literature is narrated by an isolated schoolteacher stuck in a mire of loneliness, deception, and spiritual despair.

One of the greatest works of modern Scandinavian fiction, The Liar tells the story of Johannes Lye, a teacher and parish clerk on tiny Sand Island off the coast of Denmark, a place that in winter is entirely cut off from the world at large by ice. It is winter when the book begins, and for years now Johannes has lived alone, even as he nurses a secret passion for Annemari, a former pupil. Annemari is engaged to a local man, Olaf, who has left the island but is due to return come spring. She is also being courted by a young engineer from the mainland. Such are the chief players in a compact drama, recorded in Johannes's ironic, self-lacerating, and anything but reliable diary.

Martin A. Hansen's novel beautifully evokes the stark landscape of Sand Island and the immemorial circuit of the seasons as well as the mysterious passage of time in the human heart, all the while proceeding to a supremely suspenseful conclusion.

Love, faith, and the political mingle in these two short novels by a Nobel Prize-winning Danish author. One about a young couple making a new life in Rome, the other about a priest who goes to live among native peoples in Greenland, both books explore the reaches of the human heart through their complex and unforgettable characters.

The White Bear and The Rearguard are two of Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan's most acclaimed novellas: tales of personal, political, and religious strife, full of keen psychological insight, set amid the sweeping changes of late nineteenth-century Danish society. Pontoppidan's prose is spellbinding in its taut, unvarnished grace, a quality translator Paul Larkin masterfully captures in this stunning new translation.

The White Bear is the odyssey of the priest Thorkild Müller, who becomes minister to a remote Inuit tribe in Greenland and is slowly integrated within the community. After spending much of his adult life in Greenland, he returns to Denmark, where his popularity among his parishioners brings the ire of the Church upon his head.

Newlyweds J rgen Hallager and Ursula Branth are as different as night and day. The brash son of a poor village teacher, J rgen is an avowed socialist whose revolutionary beliefs translate into his work as a painter of social realism. Ursula, on the other hand, comes from an upper-middle-class family and is politically conservative. Though each strives to change the other's worldview as they start their new life in Rome, tensions rise, and misunderstandings abound. A searching examination of art and individuality, this version of The Rearguard is the never-before-translated 1905 edition, which elucidates with greater complexity Jorgen's character as well as Ursula's resolve to temper him with love.

A Nobel Prize-winner's unforgettable novel about a man who sheds the stifling country life of his childhood for the excitement of Copenhagen.

This masterpiece of Danish literature, admired by the likes of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, is now available in a new English translation.

A Fortunate Man follows the life of Per Sidenius, the ambitious son of a Lutheran minister who revolts against the stifling religiosity of his family and flees the Danish countryside for the sights and sounds of bustling Copenhagen. Believing the coming twentieth century will be an age of science and industry, Per dreams of completing a large-scale civil engineering project that could transform Denmark into a commercial and industrial giant.

When Per gets engaged to Jakobe Salomon, whose wealthy Jewish family is eager to sponsor his project, his personal and professional happiness seem all but guaranteed. With her strong will and keen intellect, Jakobe profoundly changes Per's view of himself and the world, and is without a doubt one of the most brilliant and compelling heroines in the history of literature. But despite his good fortune, Per's life is still marred by a persistent unhappiness, and Per must question the very foundations of his being--his identity and his purpose in the world.

At once a vivid portrait of Danish national identity and a powerful exploration of choice and chance within a human life, A Fortunate Man is one of the greatest accomplishments of Nobel Prize-winning writer Henrik Pontoppidan. Paul Larkin's dazzling translation brings out as never before Pontoppidan's fluid and muscular prose, and makes available to American readers for the first time a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as one of the foundational texts of world literature.

Reeling from a breakup, a young Danish woman recovers her sense of self through conversations with parents, friends, and strangers. A sweet and quirky debut about heartbreak, memory, and the endless potential of language. ―Kirkus Reviews

The narrator's long-term girlfriend has just broken things off, forcing her to move back in with her father, a Pink Floyd-loving priest. While she desperately tries to convince her girlfriend to reconsider, the rest of the world bombards her with advice: from her childhood friend Mulle to her kindly therapist to her overbearing mother and card-playing father. Bumbling through the fog of disillusionment, the narrator gives herself permission to grieve, philosophize, and be generally outrageous until at last she sees a light at the end of the tunnel. My Mother Says is a compendium of conversations between people who talk past one another in a universe of misplaced good intentions. In this whirlwind of memories, confessions, temper tantrums, and declarations of love Pilgaard's sheer affection for her characters turns the pain of a broken heart into a heartwarming comedy of errors.