Will McDonald at The Baffler:
Out of the Darkness: Classic Short Fiction from Sweden is a new collection published by the University of Minnesota Press, spanning seven decades and the primary literary movements that defined the early twentieth century, from realism to modernism and surrealism. The collection encompasses both fairy tales and social criticism, moralism and satire. Edited by Ulf Olsson, Vendela Vida, and David Katznelson, the collection is both a celebration of great Swedish fiction and an attempt to right the wrong of keeping this work hidden from the rest of the world for so long. Among the collection’s featured authors are leading Swedish writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like August Strindberg, whose novel The Red Room is considered to be the first modern Swedish novel, and Hjalmar Söderberg, whose novel Doctor Glas is one of the greatest works of Swedish fiction of all time. The collection also features Lagerlöf and other female contemporaries: Karin Boye, Victoria Benedictsson, and Agnes von Krusenstjerna, who were at the forefront of gender and sexual advancement in Swedish literary and cultural circles at a time when the Swedish upper class still expected women to conform to conservative standards of sexless domesticity, long before the country would become the bastion of openness and social democracy it is today.
more here.
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