Danger warnings are more common than actual danger. And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning. That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport. He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in. As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown. Was it the man's slight fever? The stink of alcohol wafting off of him? He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead. It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010). Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone.
Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street. Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns. What had happened? She could feel everyone's eyes on her. Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her. Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close. Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs. Whispering to the people next to them.
Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it. Se-oh let her head drop further and further. Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding. She hurried away from them.
--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020). Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).
Every other weekend, Hugo went away. He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up. There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies. The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going. But there was still something not quite right.
On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair. When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.
The ticket was from the previous weekend. Stockholm-Malmö return, it said. Not a hint of Borås.
--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016). First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015). Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013). This segment is from page 38 in the paperback.
In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås. The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet. The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love. Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.
...
Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife. The play was not prophetic. Nothing is prophetic. What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass. What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime. And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.
--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018). First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018). Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014). These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.
On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach. It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time. The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away. They were like the wind across the waves and the grass.
--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson. This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland). English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).
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