Copenhagen by Katrine Marie Guldager, translated by P.K. Brask

Copenhagen is a collection of eleven short stories that map the city of København through subtle intertextuality. Each story takes place in a different location within the urban landscape, and these sites become a network through which its citizens move, their lives brushing up against each other but without ever connecting. Parents neglect their children in the face of everyday chores; husbands cheat on their wives with little gratification; hit-and-run drivers go home and make tomato soup. The narratives lead the reader through a landscape where consciousness, both social and poetic, become the city and the text, isolated and connected, orchestrated and restless. Guldager’s tales exude what was for Goethe the core of the short story: “the unheard-of event.”

Praise for Copenhagen:

“Copenhagen is a portrayal of a prosperous human—prosperous in the sense that he is fed, clothed, and sheltered, now dealing with existential questions beyond his everyday needs; a human trying to make meaning of an orderly world devoid of ideological substance. This struggle is not the main point of focus though: Guldager’s genius lies in portraying how this uneventful struggle affects everything around it – and how everything around it is just a sublime facade for a lack of humanity.” —Gadfly Magazine Online

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Katrine Marie Guldager has proven herself in both poetry and fiction to be a pioneering, form-shattering, poetic original. Affiliated with the 90s generation of Danish Literature she quickly proved herself as one of its most prominent and personal voices. Guldager made her debut in 1994 with a collection of poetry, Dagene skifter hænder (The Days Change Hands). In 1995, she published a collection of poetry entitled Styrt (Crash) which was translated into English in 1999. København (Copenhagen) is her first work of fiction.

P.K. Brask has co-translated four collections of Danish poetry with Patrick Friesen, most recently Niels Hav’s We are Here, also published by BookThug. He edited and translated a collection of Danish short stories titled Double Danish. His translations of plays include Ibsen and Strindberg. He is Professor of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg.