A longtime cult-classic in Denmark, this novel about dissolution and despair has been out of print in the US for over eighty years until now. Ole Jastrau is the very model of an enterprising and ambitious young man of letters, poised on the brink of what is sure to be a distinguished career as a critic. In fact he is teetering on the brink of an emotional and moral abyss. Bored with his beautiful wife and chafing at the burdens of fatherhood, disdainful of the commercialism and political opportunism of the newspaper he works for, he feels more and more that his life lacks meaning. He flirts with Catholicism and flirts with Communism, but somehow he doesn’t have the makings of a true believer. Then he takes up with the bottle, a truly meaningful relationship. “Slowly and quietly,” he intends to go to the dogs. Jastrau’s romance with self-destruction will take him through all the circles of hell. The process will be anything but slow and quiet.

Frantz Leander Hansen has written a brilliant book about Otto Stein (Martin Zerlang, University of Copenhagen, reviewing the Danish edition in Scandinavian Studies, University of Illinois Press, Vol. 92, No. 2). Jacob Paludan's Danish classic novel Jørgen Stein (1933) includes the subordinate character Otto Stein, a man about town in the roaring 1920s and a promising barrister. Involvement in small-time crime leads to large-scale confidence trickery which ends in decline, fall and suicide. This literary portrait of an epoch of deceit and fraud as a cultural phenomenon brings to the fore the economics and criminal psychology of the period. Otto Stein is viewed as an ultra-topical figure of our time, someone whose impact on the modern world is important and felt within the spheres of literature, philosophy, jurisprudence, and criminal investigation of contemporary fraudulent behaviour. Inquiry focuses on the path that leads to his suicide. Literary sources of inspiration that contributed to the moulding of the character of Otto Stein are investigated, especially those of Herman Bang, Thomas Mann and Fjodor Dostojevskij. Relevant are Jacob Paludan's other five novels that were published prior to Jørgen Stein, where seeds to Otto's character are sown. Critical to understanding the novel and the character is the scam that deprived Paludan of a financial inheritance. Herewith a superb novelistic example of how a writer merges the historical with the contemporary to reveal a psychology of exploitation dangerously meaningful to us all.

Attention is focused on crime and punishment.

The cornerstone novel in Kennedy's daring, critically-acclaimed Copenhagen Quartet, Kerrigan in Copenhagen is a raucous journey of longing and regret

This volume is a collection of essays based on papers given at the Nordic Translation Conference, which took place in London in March 2008. The purpose of the collection is twofold. First, it serves to place the Nordic languages firmly into the field of translation studies, where hitherto little research has focused on the Nordic region; the essays include many Nordic-specific studies and ideas. Second, the book presents research and conclusions which are relevant to translation studies in all languages and cultures. Therefore this volume, which covers a wide range of Nordic languages and both literary and non-literary topics, is unambiguously pertinent to the Nordic countries while also being universally valuable.