The Trouble with Happiness
Monthly Membership
Cancel anytime!
Memberships will renew every month
One credit every month on renewal
You can spend 1 credit every month to get an audiobook
“These spare and sparkling stories summon deep wells of emotion without the slightest trace of sentimentality.”
Vogue
Among longlisted titles for Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2022
Among longlisted titles for Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2022
The Trouble with Happiness is a short-story collection from Tove Ditlevsen, the acclaimed author of the Copenhagen Trilogy, never before translated in English
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.
Praise