A virtual memoir in letters by the beloved creator of the Moomins

Tove Jansson's works, even her famed Moomin books, fairly teem with letters of one kind or another, from messages bobbing in bottles to whole epistolary novels. Fortunately for her countless readers, her life was no different, unfolding as it did in the letters to family, friends, and lovers that make up this volume, a veritable autobiography over the course of six decades--and the only one Jansson ever wrote. And just as letters carry a weight of significance in Jansson's writing, those she wrote throughout her life reflect the gravity of her circumstances, the depth of her thoughts and feelings, and the critical moments of humor, sadness, and grace that mark an artist's days.

These letters, penned with characteristic insight and wit, provide an almost seamless commentary on Jansson's life within Helsinki's bohemian circles and on her island home. Shifting between hope and despair, yearning and happiness, they describe her immersion in art studies and her ascension to fame with the Moomins. They speak frankly of friendship and love, loneliness and solidarity, and also of politics, art, literature, and society. They summon a particular place and time reflected through a mind finely attuned to her culture, her world, and her own nature--all clearly put into biographical and historical context by the volume's editors, both longtime friends of Tove Jansson--and, in the end, draw a complex, intimate self-portrait of one of the world's most beloved authors.

A sweeping epic of the Viking Age, Grettir's Saga follows the life of the outlaw Grettir the Strong as he battles against sorcery, bad luck, and the vengefulness of his enemies. Feared by many, Grettir is a warrior and also a poet and a lover. Unable to resolve the dispute that has outlawed him, he lives outside the bounds of family life and he roams the countryside, ridding Iceland and Norway of berserker warriors, trolls, and the walking dead. The saga presents a poignant story of medieval Icelandic society, combining details of everyday legal disputes with folklore and legend. With its scathing humor, explicit verses, and fantastic monsters, Grettir's Saga is among the most famous and widely read of Iceland's epics. In addition to Jesse Byock's lively new translation, this edition includes extensive maps, genealogies, illustrations, a chronology and glossary, as well as helpful notes, an up-to-date bibliography, and thorough introduction exploring the saga in the context of other works of Icelandic and medieval literature.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid. Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation - to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own, the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself remains intact.

Strindberg's most important and most frequently performed plays--The Father, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, The Dance of Death, and The Ghost Sonata--are gathered together here in translations praised for their fluency and their elegance.

Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like expanding universes, while crystallizing both the beauty and the potential for destruction that permeate our times.

Verse quotation is intrinsic to the literary style of the medieval Icelandic corpus of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), one of the most important vernacular literary genres of the European Middle Ages. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that the combination of prose and verse constitutes a distinctive literary aesthetic, and that in the medieval Icelandic literary tradition, it was not a question of choosing between prose and verse as the vehicle for stories about the foundational generations of settlers on the island, but of combining both modes to forge the unique literary form of the saga. Verse quotation has always been recognised as an important aspect of the Íslendingasögur, but to date, the significance of verse to the aesthetic of the narrative has mainly been explored with reference to the sub-genre of the skáldasögur (sagas of poets), in which the proportion of verse to prose is at its highest.

The contributions to the volume analyse the Íslendingasögur as prosimetrum - that is, they treat the combination of verse and prose as a salient generic and aesthetic feature of this body of sagas. The contributors are leading scholars in the field of Old Norse studies, and their work represents current research trends in the UK, USA, Iceland, Denmark, and Germany. Their innovative approaches will enable a better understanding on the literary mode of the corpus as a whole, as well as producing fresh insights into the compositional habits of the (anonymous) authors of individual sagas.

From the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.

In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, he reflects openly and with penetrating intelligence on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the northern lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor. Accompanied by black-and-white reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman. They capture Knausgaard's remarkable ability to mediate between the personal and the universal, between life and art. Each piece glimmers with his candor and his longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.

Dr. Stockmann attempts to expose a water pollution scandal in his home town which is about to establish itself as a spa. When his brother, the mayor, conspires with local politicians and the newspaper to suppress the story, Stockmann appeals to the public meeting--only to be shouted down and reviled as 'an enemy of the people'. Ibsen's explosive play reveals his distrust of politicians and the blindly held prejudices of the 'solid majority'.

The foremost dramatist of his age, Ibsen changed theatre forever with his realistic dialogue and depiction of contemporary social problems. Here are four of his greatest works: Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Lady From the Sea, and John Gabriel Borkman.

Berg's hallucinatory, post-cataclysmic epic takes place in an unremitting future-past. The bodies mutate and hybridize. They are erotic and artificial, art and adrenaline. Available for the first time in English as a complete collection, the poems of this contemporary Swedish classic contaminate as they become contaminated--drawing on and altering source texts that range from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to string theory. Calling on fables, science, the pastoral, and the body, Dark Matter aggravates their perception while exhausting poetry down to its nerve: a faint spasm of cheers before this, the nervous system's last chance to communicate with the dying I. The result: a monstrous zone of linguistic and bodily interpenetration, cell death, and radiant permutations.

Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Longlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Award

An unflinchingly raw and lyrical exploration of a mother's grief and how it transforms her relationship to time, reality, and language.

In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back chronicles the few first years after that devastating phone call. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child and an exploration of the language of poetry, loss, and love. Intensely moving, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back explores what it is to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.

Karin Boye is Sweden's greatest woman poet. Born in 1900, she was a poet of ideas, and wrote a powerful prophetic novel, Kallocain. Her involvement in the radical literary and artistic movement Clart during the 1920s led to her interest in psychoanalysis, which influenced her literary work as well as her personal development during the latter years of her life. Intellectually and emotionally, she was far ahead of her time, and her controversial writings included the novel Crisis, in which she depicted the religious turmoil of her adolescence and her discovery of her own bisexuality. David McDuff's edition shows Karin Boye moving from youthful idealism to a desperate quest. In the early poems, she is a tense modern spirit aroused to strenuous affirmations of absolute ethical loyalties - but prone also to drift passively back into regions of the subconscious and the unconscious, where mysterious natural forces take possession of the human spirit. Her identification with nature's dark but knowing and fertile instincts becomes more complete in her later work, in which serene nature symbolism is mixed with ominously strained elements. Margaret Abenius's biography of Karin Boye is called Afflicted by Purity - a line from one of her poems. Her title captures the inner conflict at the heart of Karin Boye's poetry, and the way she rose above shattering personal defeats to write with honesty, clarity of vision and nobility of utterance. Her poetry has a strenuously angular quality which reflects - with naked candour - the harsh realities of her tragic inner struggle, which was eventually to lead to her suicide in 1941. Karin Boye is one of the trio of great Scandinavian women poets, along with Edith S dergran and Mirjam Tuominen - all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books.

A girl sits on a sofa, not knowing what to do with herself. She argues with her mother and envies her older sister. She also longs for her absent father, a seaman. A middle-aged woman paints a portrait of herself as a young girl, sitting on a sofa, but she's beginning to doubt her artistic ability. Still at odds with her sister and her mother and haunted by her dead father, she's unable to shake the continuing presence of the past in her life...

Jon Fosse's new play, and this English version by David Harrower, were commissioned by the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

A riveting family saga immersed in the gritty, dark side of Swedish immigrant life in America in the early twentieth century

When Gustaf and Anna Klar and their three children leave Sweden for New York in 1897, they take with them a terrible secret and a longing for a new life. But their dream of starting over is nearly crushed at the outset: a fire devastates Ellis Island just as they arrive, and then the relentlessly harsh conditions and lack of work in the city make it impossible for Gustaf to support his family. An unexpected gift allows the Klars to make one more desperate move, this time to the Midwest and a place called Swede Hollow.

Their new home is a cluster of rough-hewn shacks in a deep, wooded ravine on the edge of St. Paul, Minnesota. The Irish, Italian, and Swedish immigrants who live here are a hardscrabble lot usually absent from the familiar stories of Swedish American history. The men hire on as poorly paid day laborers for the Great Northern or Northern Pacific railroads or work at the nearby brewery, and the women clean houses, work at laundries, or sew clothing in stifling factories. Outsiders malign Swede Hollow as unsanitary and rife with disease, but the Klar family and their neighbors persevere in this neglected corner of the city--and consider it home.

Extensively researched and beautifully written, Ola Larsmo's award-winning novel vividly portrays a family and a community determined to survive. There are hardships, indignities, accidents, and harrowing encounters, but also acts of loyalty and kindness and moments of joy. This haunting story of a real place echoes the larger challenges of immigration in the twentieth century and today.

Njord and Skadi: A Myth Explored delves into the story of the Norse giantess Skadi and her unhappy marriage to the sea-god Njord. As compensation, after the gods killed her father, Skadi is given a choice of husbands from among the gods, but she has to choose by looking at just their feet. She chooses the finest-looking feet, believing them to belong to Baldr, but finds to her dismay that she chose the Vanir god Njord instead. Not surprisingly, the marriage does not work out, and they each return to their respective domains, with Skadi keeping her status as a goddess.

The author, Sheena McGrath, presents this book as a series of questions, using the story to open up the world of Norse myth and culture. She goes beyond the bare narrative by providing a wide perspective both on how myths work and some of the interesting theoretical questions raised in the study of mythology. Even simple questions, like why Skadi had to choose her husband by his feet alone, are shown to open up all sorts of mythological perspectives from Cinderella to medieval penitents to interpretations of myth in the 19th century.

Drawing on her extensive study of mythology the author also addresses many other important questions, including:

ASGARD, JÖTUNHEIM, MIDGARD: WHERE ARE THEY?

ARE THERE ANY STORIES SIMILAR TO THIS MYTH?

WHAT IS A GIANT?

WHY DO THE GODS AND GIANTS INTERACT AT ALL?

WHO ARE THE VANIR?

WHAT IS IT THAT GIANTESSES WANT?

WHY IS LOKI SO VULGAR?

WHY DOES LOKI BORROW A SHAPE IF HE'S A SHAPE-SHIFTER?

WHY DOES LOKI KEEP GETTING STUCK?

Influenced by the work of the scholar Margaret Clunies-Ross, who views the conflict between the gods and giants anthropologically, as a battle over resources, access to women, and power, this book does not start from the assumption that the giants are evil or stupid but treats them every bit as seriously as the gods. In this ground-breaking study, McGrath encourages the reader to question received wisdom, explore Norse mythology and its goddesses, and deepen their understanding of the 'how and why' of myth.

Inger Christensen, often cited as a Nobel contender, is one of Europe's most revered poets. Winner of the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy and the Austrian State Prize for Literature, she is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking work Det (It), a cycle of poems published in 1969. Her first book published in the U.S., alphabet (New Directions, 2001), met with a tremendous response: Seductive, said Boston Review; A visionary reincarnation of the natural world in the atomic age, wrote Chicago Review. Butterfly Valley: A Requiem collects four medium-length works, each startling for its beauty and formal innovation. Butterfly Valley is a sonnet cycle which describes the glowing color and beauty of butterflies, and also their fragility and mortality. Memory is uncovered in the poem like the fluttering of their wings. In Watersteps, the fountains and piazzas of Rome coalesce, brought alive in the imagination by the poem's shifting rhythms, lines, and overall structure. In Poem on Death the poet seeking immortality faces the whiteness of the page as the blankness of death: it feels so odd! immodest to think / about death when no one / you know has died / it means that each time / you look at yourself in the mirror / you look death in the eye / without crying / like a clear and fully! comprehensible answer / but to questions / you dare not ask. Meeting, written in extended sections, describes a coming together, yet examines our failure to connect and the ability of language to overcome this.

A probing, generative analysis of Knausgård's My Struggle, with implications for our understanding of the novel form more broadly in the twenty-first century.

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has been widely hailed for its heroic exploration of selfhood, compulsive readability, and restless experimentation with form and genre. Knausgård and the Autofictional Novel explains why. Across four chapters, Claus Elholm Andersen shows how Knausgård confronts, challenges, and rejects the symbiotic relationship between novels and fiction, particularly via a technique of auto-fictionalization. The fifth chapter then explores the further breakdown of this relationship in autofiction by Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, taking readers to what Lerner called the very edge of fiction.

Change is a matter of central concern and interest in the study of history, and it has been approached with various methodological and theoretical means in different historical disciplines. The concept is, however, rarely addressed per se, despite its fundamental role for historical insight. This book addresses different kinds of change in medieval textual culture as examples or models of change. A model can take different forms: it consists of abstract representations, like a flowchart or a series of stages within a development, it might be a concept, like paradigm shift, or a single, but telling historical example. In their different forms, models serve as conceptual tools to enlighten historical instances of change.

The contributions of this volume gather cases from a series of aspects of medieval textual culture which are subject to change: physical books, the acoustics of performed text, textualized worlds, scribes and authorship, genre, the choice of language in texts, and paleographic variance. The book also addresses problems of thinking in models and metaphors of change, as they also - as idols of the market - have the power to lead us astray if not carefully meditated.

In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Aase Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche--pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. WITH DEER [Hos rådjur] was Berg's first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world.

Oh, you have taken it too far, Aase Berg, on this field trip to dismember an apocalyptic body that is self-bomb, culture-bomb; you are scratching at the interior of the bomb that has no exterior. Amusedly, bombastically, terrifyingly you scratch. Johannes Görannson's translation is lush and boldly guttural and the two of you have my intestines by a leash. 'One by one you turned my faces up / toward the sun's surface / and drank them like deer water.'--Cathy Wagner

In late 1946, Stig Dagerman was assigned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen to report on life in Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war--their guilt and suffering. Dagerman was already a prominent writer in Sweden, but the publication and broad reception of German Autumn throughout Europe established him as a compassionate journalist and led to the long-standing international influence of the book.

Presented here in its first American edition with a compelling new foreword by Mark Kurlansky, Dagerman's essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today amid current global conflict as they were sixty years ago.