Books by Tove Ditlevsen
Childhood: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 1 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 1)
The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ―The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing―and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency
Tove knows she is a misfit whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For "long, mysterious words begin to crawl across" her soul, and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her―and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.
Childhood, the first volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.
Copies
No copies available.
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems
By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.
It was a meaningless day
like what you call
love
It was a Thursday
In parentheses. The brackets around it
Have already faded
Life tastes of ash
And is bearable.
From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems―poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen’s poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching gingerly. They stitch the gray scale of daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail, a degree of precision that renders loneliness psychedelic.
Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare qualities: the normal and the strange, the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.
Copies
-
$30.00
Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 3 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 3)
The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ―The Guardian). Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman’s journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth century writers
Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet, and the wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead―love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure, and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly―as an artist on her own terms.
The final volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.
Copies
No copies available.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
A New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year (2021)
An NPR Best Books of the Year (2021)
Called "a masterpiece" by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.
Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up―in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.
Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark’s most important modern authors.
Copies
No copies available.
Youth: The Copenhagen Trilogy: Book 2 (The Copenhagen Trilogy, 2)
The acclaimed Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" ―The Guardian) continues with Youth. Following Childhood, this second volume finds the young author consumed in trials by fire that only fuel her relentless passion for artistic freedom―placing her on a devastating and destructive path recounted in the final volume, Dependency.
Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a checkered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady, and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation―until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.
Youth, the second volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humor, vulnerability, and poeticism.
Copies
No copies available.
The Trouble with Happiness: And Other Stories
The Trouble with Happiness is a powerful new collection of short stories by Tove Ditlevsen, "a terrifying talent" (Parul Sehgal, 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 mid-century 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 re-publication in English, 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.
Copies
No copies available.
Copenhagen Trilogy (The Copenhagen Trilogy)
Called “a masterpiece” by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.
Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family, and growing up―in this sense, it’s Copenhagen’s answer to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences, but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.
Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories, and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark’s most important modern authors, with “Tove fever” gripping readers.
Copies
-
$20.00
Faces
by David Goodman, Tove Ditlevsen, Zoe Miller
From Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, comes The Faces, a searing, haunting novel of a woman on the edge, portrayed with all the vividness of lived experience.
Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children’s book writer and married mother of three, is increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and voices. She is convinced that her husband, already extravagantly unfaithful, will leave her. Most of all, she is scared that she will never write again.
Yet as she descends into a world of pills and hospitals, she begins to wonder―is insanity really something to be feared, or does it bring a kind of freedom?
Copies
No copies available.
Faces
by David Goodman, Tove Ditlevsen, Zoe Miller
Faces are all around us, everywhere we look. On every page of this inspiring and imaginative book, children will encounter unusual and creative ways of making faces, using printing, collage, geometric shapes, and sculpture. Surprising details are revealed by lifting flaps, looking through holes, or turning the book upside down.
Besides being entertaining and engaging, Faces brings everyday objects to life to inspire that artist within!
Copies
No copies available.
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die Selected Poems
By the acclaimed author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, a startling and darkly funny volume of selected poetry, the first to be translated into English.
From one of Denmark’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, the author of the acclaimed Copenhagen Trilogy, comes There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die, a major volume of selected poetry written throughout Tove Ditlevsen’s life. Infused with the same wry nihilism, quiet intensity, dark humor, and crystalline genius that readers savor in her prose, these are heartbreak poems, childhood poems, self-portraits, death poems, wounded poems, confessional poems, and love poems—poems that stare into the surfaces that seduce and deceive us. They describe childhood, longing, loss, and memory, obsessively tracing their imprints and intrusions upon everyday life. With morbid curiosity, Ditlevsen’s poems turn toward the uncanny and the abject, approaching daily disappointment with vivid, unsparing detail.
Speaking across generations to both the passions of youth and the agonies of adulthood, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die reveals everyday life stripped of its excesses, exposing its bones and bare qualities: the meaningful and the meaningless. These startling, resonant poems are both canonical and contemporary, and demand to be shared with friends, loved ones, nemeses, and strangers alike.
Copies
-
$20.00
The Trouble with Happiness And Other Stories
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.
Copies
No copies available.
The Umbrella
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books
'Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.'
Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark's most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.
Copies
No copies available.
Vilhelm's Room A Novel
A searing final novel about the collapse of a marriage and its aftermath, by the author of the modern classic Copenhagen Trilogy.
I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm . . .
The ripples from a breakup radiate outward from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts ad sets off a train of tragicomic events that leads to an inevitable conclusion. Vilhelm's Room, Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel—published a year before her untimely death in 1976—is a powerful conclusion to an extraordinary life as a poet, novelist, and memoirist: a blackly funny and devastating tour de force that pulses with life even as it journeys toward death.
Copies
-
$25.00