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The Trouble with Happiness
The Trouble with Happiness
Nov 14, 2024 5:43 PM

Author:Tove Ditlevsen,Michael Favala Goldman

The Trouble with Happiness

'So clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it is impossible to tear yourself away' John Self, Guardian

An unforgettable collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy

'The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can't have. That's where all the happiness is'

In these brief, acid-sharp stories of love, marriage and family from one of Denmark's most celebrated writers, the ordinary events of everyday life - a wife anxious not to wake her husband, a little boy losing his father's beloved knife, a woman's obsessive longing for a yellow silk umbrella - become dark and disconcerting. Here Tove Ditlevsen explores yearning, fear and the elusiveness of that strange thing called happiness.

'The purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself' Daily Telegraph

'Authentic, unforced and utterly lucid' Sunday Times

'Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair' Daily Mail

Translated by Michael Favala Goldman

Reviews

Splendid short stories... the purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself

—— Lucy Scholes , The Telegraph

An intense reading experience... so clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it's impossible to tear yourself away from the fates of her characters, however grim

—— John Self , Guardian

These short stories show off her astonishingly precise prose

—— New Statesman , Ellen Peirson-Hagger

A bracingly bleak selection of stories by the celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen... These are perfectly judged pieces: authentic, unforced and utterly lucid

—— Phil Baker , Sunday Times

Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair ... Her prose is clear and spare, pared back to the essential task of describing the struggle for an unwon freedom from domestic despair and unsatisfactory marriages

—— Daily Mail

The depths of desire and despair are Ditlevsen's subjects and illuminating them is her talent

—— Monocle

Ditlevsen's writing is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw

—— The Paris Review

A terrifying talent

—— The New York Times

Her writing is incredible, so focused and clear. Not a word that doesn't need to be there

—— Tracey Thorn

In the genre of feminine madness, these stories are to be worshipped. They are fearless, hysterical, violent yet full of grace. Each sentence escalates toward devastating, poetic insight about our bodies, about cultural demands both treasured and feared, and about what makes being alive a terror and a joy.

—— VENITA BLACKBURN, author of How to Wrestle a Girl

Chang returns with a dazzling collection of stories within stories that draw on old myths to embody the heartache and memories of Asian American women. Chang's bold conceits and potent imagery evoke a raw, visceral power that captures feelings of deep longing and puts them into words. This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.

—— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them. . . . These stories unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers . . . a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow. Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing-an important new voice.

—— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Dazzling . . . This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.

—— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[K-Ming Chang] rewrites the world as a place of radical transformation.

—— New York Times Book Review

[Her] ability, to take a common, decidedly earthbound, experience and transform it through her lens into a fantastical, otherworldly encounter shines. . . . Chang's writing reflects her gift as a lifelong listener of oral storytelling . . . and her ability to synthesize new ideas with her own spin on language.

—— San Francisco Chronicle

Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction. . . . Gods of Want is in some ways a fantasy of queer freedom. Its main characters, all Taiwanese or Chinese by birth or descent, are allowed to be who they are, to love and make love to whomever they choose.

—— Los Angeles Times

[K-Ming Chang] is back with her signature precise and enthralling prose in this short-story collection.

—— Shondaland

K-Ming Chang's inspired mix of magic and realism returns in full fabulist force. . . . The stories are eclectic . . . and united by Chang's fascination with the queer and quotidian in her characters' worlds. . . . Piercing.

—— Esquire

Her new short-story collection Gods of Want both widens and calcifies the expansiveness of her range. . . . Chang is singular amongst us all. . . . New work from Chang is a cause for celebration-a holiday in its own right-and it's also a reminder of the infinite possibilities on the page. . . . Nothing short of marvelous.

—— Bryan Washington , Electric Literature
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