Books
A Difficult Death: The Life And Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen (Foreword by James Wood)
Yale University Press | September 2017 | $30 (Hardback)
“Morten Høi Jensen…brilliantly restores Jens Peter Jacobsen to a place in modern world fiction that should never have been vacated. This is one of the most elegant and incisive critical biographies I’ve read.”—James Wood
"Morten Høi Jensen’s sensitive, wide-ranging study aims at providing readers today with. . . a chance to look beyond the early, painful, meaningless death that stole so much of Jacobsen’s energy and time to the achingly beautiful works he created."—Julie K. Allen, Times Literary Supplement
Havoc by Tom Kristensen (Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen)
New York Review Books Classics | June 2018 | $18.95 (Paperback)
A longtime cult-classic in Denmark, this novel about dissolution and despair has been out of print in the US for over eighty years until now.
Ole Jastrau is the very model of an enterprising and ambitious young man of letters, poised on the brink of what is sure to be a distinguished career as a critic. In fact he is teetering on the brink of an emotional and moral abyss. Bored with his beautiful wife and chafing at the burdens of fatherhood, disdainful of the commercialism and political opportunism of the newspaper he works for, he feels more and more that his life lacks meaning. He flirts with Catholicism and flirts with Communism, but somehow he doesn’t have the makings of a true believer. Then he takes up with the bottle, a truly meaningful relationship. “Slowly and quietly,” he intends to go to the dogs.
THE LIAR by Tom MARTIN A. HANSEN (Introduction by Morten Høi Jensen)
New York Review Books Classics | April 2023 | $18.95 (Paperback)
One of the greatest works of modern Scandinavian fiction, The Liar tells the story of Johannes Lye, a teacher and parish clerk on tiny Sand Island off the coast of Denmark, a place that in winter is entirely cut off from the world at large by ice. It is winter when the book begins, and for years now Johannes has lived alone, even as he nurses a secret passion for Annemari, a former pupil. Annemari is engaged to a local man, Olaf, who has left the island but is due to return come spring. She is also being courted by a young engineer from the mainland. Such are the chief players in a compact drama, recorded in Johannes’s ironic, self-lacerating, and anything but reliable diary.
Martin A. Hansen’s novel beautifully evokes the stark landscape of Sand Island and the immemorial circuit of the seasons as well as the mysterious passage of time in the human heart, all the while proceeding to a supremely suspenseful conclusion.