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.”

Katrine Marie Guldager (born 1966) has worked with poetry and prose and has proven herself in both genres to be a pioneering, form-shattering, poetic original. Guldager received a graduate-level degree in Danish from the University of Copenhagen in 1994 and made her debut that same year with her collection of poetry, Dagene skifter h�nder (The Days Change Hands) . Guldager attended Forfatterskolen (The Danish Writers' School) in Copenhagen. She belongs to the �90s generation in Danish Literature and has become one of its most prominent and personal voices. In 1995, she published a collection of poetry entitled Styrt (Crash) which was translated into English in 1999. Guldager's latest book is a collection of short stories entitled K?benhavn (Copenhagen).

Katrine Guldager's profile page

P.K. BRASK has co-translated multiple collections of Danish poetry with Patrick Friesen. He edited and translated a collection of Danish short stories titled Double Danish. His translations of plays include Ibsen and Strindberg. He is a Professor of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg.

P.K. Brask's profile page

“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