The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories

Tove Ditlevsen

Apr 2022 · Dijual oleh Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen, "a terrifying talent" (Parul Sehgal, 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 mid-century 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 re-publication in English, 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.

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Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971).

Michael Favala Goldman is a poet, a jazz clarinetist, and a widely published translator of Danish literature. More than one hundred of his translations have appeared in journals such as The Harvard Review and The Columbia Journal. Among his ten translated books are The Water Farm Trilogy, Farming Dreams, and Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. He lives in Florence, Massachusetts.