The Copenhagen Trilogy

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374602390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This single-volume hardcover contains all three volumes of her memoirs Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband. Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up—in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction. Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with "Tove fever" gripping readers.

Dependency

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374722951
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" —The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth century writers Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead—love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly—as an artist on her own terms. The final volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.

Youth

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241405564
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 105

Book Description
'Utterly, agonisingly compulsive ... a masterpiece' Liz Jensen, Guardian The second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach. Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.

Childhood

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374602387
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" —The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing—and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency Tove knows she is a misfit whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For "long, mysterious words begin to crawl across" her soul, and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her—and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind. Childhood, the first volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.

The Faces

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250838207
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
From Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, comes The Faces, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience. Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children’s book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again. Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder—is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?

The Trouble with Happiness

Author: Tove Ditlevsen
Publisher: Picador USA
ISBN: 1250863104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
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.

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Author: Yehuda Amichai
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374235252
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
The largest English-language collection to date from Israel’s finest poet Few poets have demonstrated as persuasively as Yehuda Amichai why poetry matters. One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Amichai created remarkably accessible poems, vivid in their evocation of the Israeli landscape and historical predicament, yet universally resonant. His are some of the most moving love poems written in any language in the past two generations—some exuberant, some powerfully erotic, many suffused with sadness over separation that casts its shadow on love. In a country torn by armed conflict, these poems poignantly assert the preciousness of private experience, cherished under the repeated threats of violence and death. Amichai’s poetry has attracted a variety of gifted English translators on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s to the present. Assembled by the award-winning Hebrew scholar and translator Robert Alter, The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai is by far the largest selection of the master poet’s work to appear in English, gathering the best of the existing translations as well as offering English versions of many previously untranslated poems. With this collection, Amichai’s vital poetic voice is now available to English readers as it never has been before.

Novel 11, Book 18

Author: Dag Solstad
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228290
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
A brilliant novel by the Norwegian master Dag Solstad Bjorn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to devote himself to an amateur theater.In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjorn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiotz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjorn carry his preposterous plan through to its logical conclusion. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjorn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he’s tangled up in a game or reality. Dag Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, a concentrated uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author’s remarkable gifts and wit.

The Little Café in Copenhagen (Romantic Escapes, Book 1)

Author: Julie Caplin
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008259739
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
*Short-listed for Best Contemporary Romance at the Romantic Novelists’ Association Romance of the Year Awards 2019* Welcome to the little cafe in Copenhagen where the smell of cinnamon fills the air, the hot chocolate is as smooth as silk and romance is just around the corner...

The Pillars of the Earth

Author: Ken Follett
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101442190
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1009

Book Description
#1 New York Times Bestseller Oprah's Book Club Selection The “extraordinary . . . monumental masterpiece” (Booklist) that changed the course of Ken Follett’s already phenomenal career—and begins where its prequel, The Evening and the Morning, ended. “Follett risks all and comes out a clear winner,” extolled Publishers Weekly on the release of The Pillars of the Earth. A departure for the bestselling thriller writer, the historical epic stunned readers and critics alike with its ambitious scope and gripping humanity. Today, it stands as a testament to Follett’s unassailable command of the written word and to his universal appeal. The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known . . . of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect—a man divided in his soul . . . of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame . . . and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother. A spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England, this is Ken Follett’s historical masterpiece.