Norvik Press – förlag

This is the most comprehensive history of modern Swedish literature to have been published in English. The book includes both in-depth studies of major writers like August Strindberg, Hjalmar Soederberg and Par Lagerkvist and survey accounts of the more important periods and movements, from the neo-romantic writers of the 1890s to the uniquely important working-class literature of the 1930s and the modernist lyric poetry of the following decade. The authors are all acknowledged experts in their respective fields, and the volume is designed and written both for the general reader, who will find it a valuable introduction to a fascinating body of literature, and the specialist student, for whom it provides an authoritative first port of call. The volume is also equipped with suggestions for further reading and a helpful bibliography of English translations of many of the works discussed in the various essays.

Written in 1899, Selma Lagerlof's novella A Manor House Tale is at one and the same time a complex psychological novel and a folk tale, a love story and a Gothic melodrama. It crosses genre boundaries and locates itself in a borderland between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, darkness and light, possession and loss, life and death. Lagerlof's two young characters, Gunnar and Ingrid, the one driven to madness by the horrific death of his goats in a blizzard, the other falling into a death-like trance as a result of the absence of familial warmth, rescue each other from their psychological underworlds and return to an everyday world that is now enhanced by the victory of goodness and love. Selma Lagerlof (1858-1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlof in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

Barbara, originally written in Danish, was the only novel by the Faroese author Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen (1900–1938), and yet it quickly achieved international best-seller status and is still one of the best-loved twentieth century classics in Danish and Faroese literature. On the face of it, Barbara is a straightforward historical novel in the mode of many a so-called 'romance'. It contains a story of passion in an exotic setting with overtones of semi-piracy; there is a powerful erotic element, an outsider who breaks up a marriage, and a built-in inevitability resulting from Barbara's own psychological make-up. She stands as one of the most complex female characters in modern Scandinavian literature: beautiful, passionate, innocent, devoted, amoral and uncomprehending of her own tragedy. Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen portrays her with a fascinated devotion.

Written in 1912, Selma Lagerlöf's The Phantom Carriage is a powerful combination of ghost story and social realism, partly played out among the slums and partly in the transitional sphere between life and death. The vengeful and alcoholic David Holm is led to atonement and salvation by the love of a dying Salvation Army slum sister under the guidance of the driver of the death-cart that gathers in the souls of the dying poor. Inspired by Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, The Phantom Carriage remained one of Lagerlöf's own favourites, and Victor Sjöström's 1921 film version of the story is one of the greatest achievements of the Swedish silent cinema.

August Strindberg (1849–1912, Sweden's internationally recognised dramatist, was an astonishingly prolific all-rounder. The new National Edition of his works will run to seventy-two volumes: he was a writer of novels, short stories, essays, journalism and satire, he experimented with early photography, and in recent years his paintings have achieved the recognition they deserve. His novel The People of Hemsö (1887) will come as a surprise to most English-language readers, used as they are to seeing the bitter controversialist of plays like The Father and Miss Julie or the seeker for cosmic meaning and reconciliation of those mysterious later dream plays To Damascus and A Dream Play. This novel, a tragicomic story of lust, love and death among the fishermen and farmers of the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago, reveals a very different Strindberg. The vigour and humour of the narration, as well as its cinematic qualities, are such that we witness a great series of peopled panoramas in which place and time and character are somehow simultaneously specific and archetypical, and we leave the novel with memories of grand landscapes and spirited scenes.In a recent essay Ludvig Rasmusson wrote: 'For me, The People of Hemsoe is the Great Swedish Novel, just as ...The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [is] the Great American Novel'. His comparison is an apt one: if the Mississippi becomes the quintessence of America, the island of Hemsoe and the archipelago become the quintessence of Sweden.

This spirited and at times sinister novel ensnares the reader in a tangled encounter between modern-day Scandinavia and the ancient world of myth. In the 1980s, a hardworking Icelandic businesswoman and her teenage daughter Dis, who has been arrested for apparently committing a strange and senseless robbery, are unwittingly drawn into a ritual-bound world of goddesses, sacrificial priests, golden thrones, clashing crags and kings-in-waiting. It is said that Gunnloth was seduced by Odin so he could win the 'mead' of poetry from her, but is that really true, and why was Dis summoned to their world? The boundaries dissolve and the parallels between Gunnloth's circle and the strange company into which Dis's mother is drawn as she fights to clear Dis's name grow ever closer. The earth-cherishing goddess seems set on a collision course with strategic thinker Odin who has discovered that iron can be extracted from the marshes where she resides, and environmental disaster also looms in the modern context, brought into sharp focus by a shocking world event.At the same time the novel is a moving, under-the-skin portrait of a mother in crisis, cast into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions by seeing her daughter under arrest and in prison. Dis's father has refused to get involved, claiming he is too busy. Her mother is left to tussle with lawyers and fight to clear Dis's name. She goes to Copenhagen in order to be near the prison where Dis is on remand. The couple's business ambitions for a government contract will be in shreds if the prosecution accuses Dis of involvement with a terrorist group, but on the other hand, how can any mother willingly pursue the option of agreeing that her own daughter is mentally ill? Particularly when she has followed Dis into the depths of legend in her quest for the truth?

Two British environmental activists are discovered dead amongst the whale corpses after a whale-kill in Torshavn. The detective Hannis Martinsson is asked to investigate by a representative of the organisation Guardians of the Sea - who shortly afterwards is killed when his private plane crashes. Suspicion falls on Faroese hunters, angry at persistent interference in their traditional whale hunt; but the investigation leads Martinsson to a much larger group of international vested interests, and the discovery of a plot which could devastate the whole country.

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.

'He realised that he would drown here. Someone had crafted this seat to drown people. To drown him. Terror rushed from his brain to rouse every cell in his body, but there was nothing to be done. He was well and truly tethered. Slowly it dawned on him that he did know why he was sitting here. He'd spent all his life running from this nightmare, and now he'd landed in its clutches.'Dead Men Dancing begins with the discovery of a corpse on the beach, the body of a man who has been shackled to rocks and left to drown. As the journalist Hannis Martinsson investigates, he comes across evidence of more deaths which have been caused in the same way, and starts to realise that they are all linked to a local revolt several decades earlier, which tore a community apart. The repercussions have continued to the present day, and Hannis' enquiries soon put his own life in danger.

For poverty-stricken farm labourer Jan, the birth of his daughter Klara gives life a new meaning; his devotion to her develops into an obsession that excludes all else. We are taken from the miracle of a newborn child and a father's love of his baby girl into a fantasy world emerging as a result of extreme external pressures, in which Jan creates for himself the role of Emperor of Portugallia. Yet this seemingly mad world generates surprising insights and support. Described as 'perhaps the most private of Selma Lagerlöf's books', the novel takes us deep into a father-daughter relationship that carries the seeds of tragedy within it almost from the start. Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlöf in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

The God of Chance focuses on the relationship between Ana, a high-flying Danish career woman from the international finance sector whose work is her life, and the young teenager Mariama, two women whose circumstances are completely different. Ana first meets Mariama selling snacks on a beach in Gambia, and the girl gradually becomes a substitute for the family she has never had. The novel moves to Copenhagen and then to London as Ana brings Mariama to Europe to be educated; the girl finds the cultural shock and living with Ana intensely difficult, whilst Ana's obsession with her leads to her own carefully controlled life descending into chaos. The story depicts the gulf between European affluence and Third World poverty; it explores our dependence on money, our need to be in control in every situation, and the problematic relationship between sponsor or donor and recipient. The scene moves from colourful depictions of life in a luxury hotel in Africa, cheek by jowl with desperate poverty, to elite designer flats in Copenhagen, and finally the bustling multicultural community on the streets of London.This novel from 2011 is the latest by the prize-winning Danish author Kirsten Thorup. Her most well-known works are her series of four novels about little Jonna from the provinces, which are also about growing up into the rapidly-changing Danish society of the late twentieth century; and Bonsai (2000), an unflinching account of the scourge of Aids and its devastating effect on an ordinary family.

This new addition to Norvik Press’s well-established ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series turns the spotlight on the power of short stories. Key autobiographical pieces, morality tales both dark and light, legends from several lands and folklore-inspired narratives combine to reveal the breadth and stylistic range of Lagerlöf’s storytelling skills.This is a collection of interest to general readers but also a useful teaching tool for Swedish and comparative literature courses around the world. The book includes a comprehensive and accessible introduction by Lagerlöf specialist Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (University of Edinburgh). The nine stories have been arranged into three thematic sections: Women and Writing; Landscapes, Families and ‘Others’; Epochs, Societies and Values.

Penwoman is the classic novel about the Swedish women's suffrage movement. Originally published in 1910, this was Elin Wägner's second novel. Having begun her career as a journalist, she went on to become one of Sweden's leading writers, her prolific output developing radical feminist and feminist-pacifist tendencies.The novel, whose central character is a young female journalist, offers exceptional insights into the dedicated work and strong sense of sisterhood uniting a group of women campaigning for suffrage. But it also explores a range of other issues affecting the situation of women in Sweden at the time, from the role of paid work to matters of morality, eroticism and love. The refreshingly disrespectful and witty style has helped make the novel one of Wägner's most enduringly popular.

A curse rests on the Löwensköld family, as narrated in The Löwensköld Ring. Charlotte Löwensköld is the tale of the following generations, a story of psychological insight and social commentary, and of the complexities of a mother-son relationship. Charlotte is in love with Karl-Arthur – both have some Löwensköld blood. Their young love is ill fated; each goes on to marry another. How we make our life 'choices' and what evil forces can be at play around us is beautifully and ironically depicted by Selma Lagerlöf, who was in her sixties when she wrote this tour de force with the lightest imaginable touch.

Murder in the Dark sports a winning combination of engaging crime narrative and cool, unsentimental appraisal of Scandinavian society (as seen through the eyes of its shabby, unconventional anti-hero). There are elements of the book which now seem quite as relevant as when they were written, and like all the most accomplished writing in the Nordic Noir field, there is an acute and well-observed sense of place throughout the novel. The descriptions of Copenhagen channel the poetic sensibility which is the author's own: 'Copenhagen is at its most beautiful when seen out of a taxi at midnight, right at that magical moment when one day dies and another is born, and the printing presses are buzzing with the morning newspapers.'

Life in a grand Norwegian mountain hotel is not what it used to be; Norwegians have deserted the traditions of their nati- ve land, with its invigorating ski trips and lake-fresh trout, for charter tours to `the infernal south'. Sedd's grandparents are fighting a losing battle to maintain standards at Fa vnesheim hotel, which has been in the family for generations, whilst the young Sedd observes developments with a keen eye for the absurd and a growing sense of unease that all is not well. He has his own demons too, as he tries to unearth the truth about his father, an Indian doctor who died as Sedd was conceived, and his mother, who was `taken by Time' when he was a toddler and whom he remembers only as a foxy-red sheen in the air.Death stalks this peaceful place, as cracks in the polished surface begin to show. The first to die is the bank manager, who has kept the hotel going on credit, and whose demi- se has ominous consequences for the whole district. Then the new bank manager's daughter almost literally pesters the life out of Sedd; he has trained as a life-saver, but finds saving people more complicated than he had thought. He becomes obsessed with a locked room, which he imagines will reveal the truth about his mother - but it refuses to give up its secrets.Erik Fosnes Hansen's latest work from 2016 is a coming- of-age novel with a narrator who stands comparison with Holden Caulfield or David Copperfield.

Edith Södergran's vital, compelling and very personal poems have been translated into many languages, and several times into English. Written for the most part when she was dying of tuberculosis in a remote Finnish frontier village only a short train journey away from revolutionary Petrograd, they are a major contribution to European modernism. These letters are almost all that remains to us of her work, apart from the poetry. The most personal of them were written between 1919 and 1923 to two like-minded young Finland-Swedish writers, Hagar Olsson and Elmer Diktonius. They are unusually spontaneous and show Södergran in many moods, passionate and caring, intransigent, desperate for human contact, and racked by religious doubts that threaten to stifle the very poetry for which she lived. The collection is accompanied by an introduction and notes which both contextualize the letters and greatly enhance our understanding of Södergran's life and poetry."

1968. Riga. News of the Prague Spring washes across Europe, causing ripples on either side of the Iron Curtain. A young Estonian woman has agreed to pose as a model for a famous sculptor, who is trying to evade military service and escape to the West. Although the model has only a vague awareness of politics - her interest in life is primarily poetic - the consequences of the politics of both past and present repeatedly make themselves felt. Chance remarks overheard prompt memories of people and places, language itself becomes fluid, by turns deceptive and reassuring.The Beauty of History is a novel of poetic intensity, of fleeting moods and captured moments. It is powerfully evocative of life within the Baltic States during the Soviet occupation, and of the challenge to artists to express their individuality whilst maintaining at least an outward show of loyalty to the dominant ideology. Written on the cusp of independence, as Estonia and Latvia sought to regain their sovereignty in 1991, this is a novel that can be seen as an historic document - wistful, unsettling, and beautiful...Viivi Luik is one of Estonia's most highly-acclaimed and well-known writers.The Beauty of History has been published in eleven languages.

Kerstin Ekman's novel Blackwater took the world by storm in 1993 and has now been translated into over twenty-five languages. But her reputation as one of Sweden's best-known and most successful authors rests just as securely upon the series of four novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983, which are based on the author's childhood home town of Katrineholm some forty miles southwest of Stockholm. The first of these, Witches' Rings, which portrays the final years of the nineteenth century in a small urban community on the cusp of industrialisation, was published by Norvik Press in 1997. The Spring, which focuses on the lives of three women, Tora, Frida and Ingrid, moves the story on from the early twentieth century to the interwar years.According to Ekman herself, two major socio-psychological studies carried out in Katrineholm indicate 'that this was a community with which its inhabitants were content... I have devoted eleven years of my life to maintaining the exact opposite.' This is accomplished in a narrative of great subtlety and compelling power; once again Kerstin Ekman recreates the past with an authenticity that resonates urgently in the present.

What happens to an individual who is rejected by society? What happens to a society that eventually realises the living are more important than the dead, and that it is suffering a crisis of values and priorities? What does war do to us and to our outlook on the world? Selma Lagerlöf struggled with these issues throughout World War I and experienced a mental block in writing about them. Then she found an opening and produced a thought-provoking tale of love, death and survival that grapples with moral dilemmas as relevant today as they were a century ago. Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) stablished herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlöf in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

Victoria Benedictsson published Money, her first novel, in 1885. Set in rural southern Sweden where the author lived, it follows the fortunes of Selma Berg, a girl whose fate has much in common with that of Madame Bovary and Ibsen's Nora. The gifted young Selma is forced to give up her dreams of going to art school when her uncle persuades her to marry, at the age of sixteen, a rich older squire. Profoundly shocked by her wedding night and by the mercenary nature of the marriage transaction, she finds herself trapped in a life of idle luxury. She finds solace in her friendship with her cousin and old sparring partner Richard; but as their mutual regard threatens to blossom into passion, she draws back from committing adultery and from the force of her own sexuality. The naturalism and implicit feminism of Money place it firmly within the radical literary movement of the 1880s known as Scandinavia's Modern Breakthrough. Benedictsson became briefly a member of that movement, but her difficult personal life and her struggles to achieve success as a writer led to her suicide only three years later.

Karlsen is a down-on-his-luck private investigator looking for work. When the only job on offer is a contract killing, Karlsen agrees despite his lack of experience. Things don't go to plan and it seems the contract is open to negotiation. The play follows the twists and turns of an inexperienced contract killer with a weakness for turquoise dresses and wide-eyed women. This absurdist comedy by one of Denmark's best-loved writers sees the fates of the eponymous contract killer, his target, the employer and his wife, twist, turn and hang in the balance. What is a life worth? Who will survive? And will the hair dye ever make it to Pakistan?

To Pieces is Henry Parland's (1908–1930) only novel, published posthumously after his death from scarlet fever. Ostensibly the story of an unhappy love affair, the book is an evocative reflection upon the Jazz Age as experienced in the Baltic. Parland was profoundly influenced by Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and reveals his narrative through fragments of memory, drawing on his fascination with photography, cinema, jazz, fashion and advertisements. Parland was the product of a cosmopolitan age: his German-speaking Russian parents left St Petersburg to escape political turmoil, only to become caught up in Finland's own civil war – Parland first learned Swedish at the age of fourteen. To remove Parland from a bohemian and financially ruinous life in Helsinki, his parents sent him to Kaunas in Lithuania, where he absorbed the theories of the Russian Formalists. To Pieces became the focus of renewed interest following the publication of a definitive critical edition in 2005, and has since been published to great acclaim in German, French and Russian translation.

Today, change in our material lives is a constant. Many now living have seen the advent not only of the mobile phone and the Internet, but also of space exploration, vaccines and even indoor plumbing. This in contrast to the world you now enter in The Railroad, where the diminutive Matti and Liisa are aging in a corner of the world in which peasant life has remained unaltered for centuries. When the iron rails reach the forests of Eastern Finland, however, that solitude and constancy are forever altered. The Railroad (1884) was prose writer, poet, translator and journalist Juhani Aho's first major literary work. There is some disagreement as to whether he or Aleksis Kivi (best known for his 1870 novel Seven Brothers) should be named the first professional Finnish author. There is no doubt, however, that Aho's modern usage of the Finnish language and application of realistic style - although romantic elements also appear in The Railroad - place him as one of the progenitors of Finnish literature, which has been closely identified with realism ever since.In both his topics and his style we witness a critical stage in the cultural development of what is now one of the most advanced nations in the world.

An economical and haunting tale, published in book form in 1904 and set in the sixteenth century on the snowbound west coast of Sweden, Lord Arne's Silver is a classic from the pen of an author consummately skilled in the deployment of narrative power and ambivalence. A story of robbery and murder, retribution, love and betrayal plays out against the backdrop of the stalwart fishing community of the archipelago. Young Elsalill, sole survivor of the mass killing in the home of rich cleric Lord Arne, becomes a pawn in dangerous games both earthly and supernatural. As the deep-frozen sea stops the murderers escaping, sacrifice and atonement are the price that has to be paid.

The Löwensköld Ring (1925) is the first volume of the trilogy considered to have been Selma Lagerlöf's last work of prose fiction. Set in the Swedish province of Värmland in the eighteenth century, the narrative traces the consequences of the theft of General Löwensköld's ring from his coffin, and develops into a disturbing tale of revenge from beyond the grave. It is also a tale about decisive women. The narrative twists and the foregrounding of alternative interpretations confront the reader with a pervasive sense of ambiguity. Along with the narrative technique, the spell of the ring extends into the two subsequent volumes, Charlotte Löwensköld (1925) and Anna Svärd (1928).

To most English-language readers and theatre goers, Strindberg is mainly known for naturalistic plays such as 'Miss Julie' and 'The Father', but the dramatic production of Sweden's national playwright is infinitely richer and more extensive than these would suggest. This volume presents four of Strindberg's lesser known one act plays, 'The Bond', 'Facing Death', 'The Outlaw' and 'Simoom', written between 1871 and 1892, which showcase Strindberg's remarkable range. 'The Bond' and 'Facing Death', which fall at the end of the time span, are familiarly naturalistic plays set in contemporary European settings which demonstrate Strindberg's provocative engagement with contentious issues of his day. The early experiment 'The Outlaw', however, takes place in the frigid landscapes of the Viking north, drawing heavily on the style of Icelandic sagas. In Simoom, written in 1889, a practically gothic narrative transports us to the scorching deserts of French colonised Algeria, allowing us to observe the beginnings of Strindberg's experimental, mystical phase which culminated in 'A Dream Play'.Different as the four plays are, however, when read together they form a thematic unity, revealing the beating heart of Strindberg's creativity, the issue at the core of his writing: love as a war eternally waged man and woman, husband and wife, children and parents and individuals and society. The four plays were translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé, Anna Holmwood, John K Mitchinson, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Anna Tebelius and Nichola Smalley.

Captain Jager is the well-meaning but temperamental head of a rural family living in straitened circumstances in 1840s Norway. The novel focuses on the fates of the women of the family: the heroic Ma, who struggles unremittingly to keep up appearances and make ends meet, and their eldest daughter Thinka, forced to renounce the love of her life and marry an older and wealthier suitor. Then there is the younger daughter, the talented and beautiful Inger-Johanna, destined to make a splendid match - but will the captain with the brilliant diplomatic career ahead of him make her happy? With great empathy and affection for each member of the family Lie evokes the tragedy of hopes dashed by the harsh social and economic realities of the day, and the influence of one person who dares to think differently. Both in the landscape and in the characters the wildness of nature is played out against the constraints of culture.

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906–07) is truly unique. Starting life as a commissioned school reader designed to present the geography of Sweden to nine-year-olds, it quickly won the international fame and popularity it still enjoys over a century later. The story of the naughty boy who climbs on the gander's back and is then carried the length of the country, learning both geography and good behaviour as he goes, has captivated adults and children alike, as well as inspiring film-makers and illustrators. The elegance of the present translation – the first full translation into English – is beautifully complemented by the illustrations specially created for the volume.