Check out my review of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume IV, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions), over in Ancillary Review of Books! You can read my reviews of previous books in the series here, here, and here.
The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French (France) by Jordan Stump (Vintage, April 7) Equal parts dreamlike and disquieting, The Witch tells a tale as old as time, with a dark twist: Without looking back, children fly the nest, laying bare the tenuous threads of family that have long threatened to snap. With
Check out the Booker Prizes interview with Danish author Olga Ravn and translator Martin Aitken about Ravn’s The Wax Child here!
translated by Martin Aitken original publication (in Danish): 2023 first English edition: 2025, New Directions 144 pages grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library This small, strange, polyphonic book refuses to settle down into something knowable. As someone who’s learned about and read multiple texts about the (American) witch hunts
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan, translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood (S&S/Summit Books, September 2) Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis. A grand,
translated by Barbara Haveland original publication (in Danish): 2020 first English edition: 2024, New Directions 185 pages grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library Review of Book I We left Tara Selter at the end of Book I attempting to figure out how to move forward, despite being trapped in
translated by Barbara Haveland original publication (in Danish): 2020 first English edition: 2024, New Directions 160 pages grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature, On the Calculation of Volume I is a book in which so much, and so little,
edited by Carl-Eddy Skovgaard Afterword by Niels Dalgaard Science Fiction Cirklen, 2010 242 pages grab a copy here Sky City is a hidden gem. With stories drawn from the first two “best of the best” science fiction anthologies published by Science Fiction Cirklen (the Danish science fiction fan association) in 2007 and 2008, this SFT
translated from the Danish by Joan Tate original edition: 1969 translated edition: Doubleday, 1971 183 pages grab a copy through your local independent bookstore or library Also see SF Ruminations and The Complete Review for their thoughts on this strange and fascinating novel Anders Bodelsen’s Freezing Down came out in Denmark around the time that
translated by Martin Aitken Lolli Editions (2020), New Directions (2022) 133 pages grab a copy here or or through your local independent bookstore or library Olga Ravn’s The Employees is the first work of Danish SFT I’ve ever read, and it doesn’t disappoint. Presented as a series of statements given to a committee by human
