Short Fiction

Hjalmar Söderberg was a Swedish author, working from the end of the nineteenth century up until the 1930s. While most famous now for his novel Doctor Glas-a favorite of Margaret Atwood's-he also wrote other books, plays, and several collections of short stories. His stories have several common themes: human desire and self-deception, the inability for people to ever truly understand each other, and bittersweet reminiscences of the past. A Stockholm resident for most of his life, his work draws heavy inspiration from the locale and its social structures. This collection of short fiction was primarily translated by Charles Wharton Stork, who was a major promoter of Swedish literature in the interwar period. Perfect for readers who appreciate nuanced psychological fiction and the melancholic beauty of Scandinavian literature, these masterfully crafted stories offer profound insights into the human condition with elegant restraint. Söderberg's keen observations of love, longing, and self-deception will resonate with fans of Alice Munro and Anton Chekhov, making this collection an essential addition to any literary fiction lover's library. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)