The Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short
stories by Tove Ditlevsen, "a terrifying talent" (Parul Sehgal, The New
York Times).
A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a
husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother
impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these
precisely observed tales of marriage and family life in midcentury
Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence, and despair, as women and
men struggle to escape from the roles assigned to them and dream of
becoming free and happy--without ever truly understanding what that
might mean.
Tove Ditlevsen is one of Denmark's most famous and beloved writers, and
her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy was hailed as a masterpiece on
republication in English, named a New York Times Best Book of the
Year, and lauded for its wry humor, limpid prose, and powerful honesty.
The poignant and understated stories in The Trouble with Happiness,
written in the 1950s and 1960s and never before translated into English,
offer readers a new chance to encounter the quietly devastating work of
this essential twentieth-century writer.