Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935–2009) remains one of Denmark’s most distinguished and original authors. Part of a seven-writer project modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, Natalja’s Stories focuses on the shifting ground of meaning. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother—about her mother, “abducted” from Copenhagen, taken to Russia, from where she must flee after the Revolution. She dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. The story is told and retold in marvelous ways, often hilariously, involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. The Danish critic Marie Louise Kjølbye notes how relevant the novel is today: “Instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalizing account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else—offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on the migrant’s fate as a tragic narrative.”

We would like to thank the Danish Arts Foundation for their generous support in the translation and publication of Natalja's Stories.

The Painted Room is a magnificent three-part novel about the Italian Renaissance—specifically, the intrigue surrounding the frescoes that Andrea Mantegna painted on the walls of a famous bridal chamber in the ducal palace of the Gonzagas. Prince Lodovico invites Mantegna to his palace to decorate the chamber, and the paintings are slowly completed. The portraits of the duke and his family look so peaceful—you would never guess that a murder had just taken place. The duke’s secretary records the progress in his gossip-laden diary, while the story of the prince’s daughter, the dwarf Nana, digs deeper into darker motivations involving deceit, vendettas, an assassination, and the dalliances of Pope Pius II. Mantegna’s young son, Bernardino, helps complete the paintings and introduces a note of high fantasy into the narrative. What results is a beautiful yet startling picture of the Renaissance, as rich and colorful as the men and women depicted on the palace walls.

Set in modern Europe, Azorno is a kind of logic puzzle or house of mirrors, concerning five women and two men. One of the men is a writer named Sampel, the other is the main character of his novel, Azorno. All the women are pregnant by Sampel, but which of them is really the narrator? Has someone been killed? Is someone insane? Is the whole story part of Sampel’s book, or Inger Christensen’s? Reminiscent of the works of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Azorno illuminates the prevailing theme throughout Inger Christensen’s great body of poetry and fiction: the interplay of perception, language, and reality. As Anne Carson said, “Like Hesiod, Inger Christensen wants to give us an account of what is — of everything that is and how it is and what we are in the midst of.” Ending with the struggle between two merged characters, Azorno simultaneously satisfies and unsettles, leaving us with a view of reality unlike any other.