Sleet: Selected Stories

Начало книги

I was introduced to the work of Stig Dagerman by his daughter, Lo, nearly twenty-five years ago. At the time we were both mothers of preschool sons, and in the way of mothers overseeing playdates, we had begun to exchange brief biographies as we sat together on Lo’s back deck while our boys played their imaginary games in her yard. I learned that Lo’s father had been a Swedish writer of much renown, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, and a playwright. He was also a journalist. In 1946, he had been sent on assignment to postwar Germany to record the devastation there, one of the first independent journalists to do so. His second wife, Lo’s mother, Anita Björk, was an actress. He committed suicide in 1954, at thirty-one, when Lo was younger than our sons were when we met.

Of course, I asked if her father’s work was available in English. Lo had a British edition of German Autumn, her father’s collected articles about the German people after the fall of the Third Reich; a book of short stories called The Games of Night; and a novel, A Burnt Child. She hoped eventually, she said, to find some time (as working mothers of preschool children, we were well familiar with that how to find the time refrain) to seek out an American translator for her father’s work.

Читать дальше →