Dark Paradise

A man murders a grocer over fifteen cents--but in the sharp, icy prose and detached tone that defines this collection, his crime seems neither sensational nor entirely reprehensible. Rosa Liksom populates a world of snow-covered landscapes, antiseptic apartments, fish factories, and lumber camps with the obsessive, the violent, and the unhinged. A woman refuses to leave prison until she has served her entire sentence. A man obsessively cleans his apartment as his life moves on around him. A woman kills her new husband over his neediness and inability to leave their bed. The stark lives and actions of these characters are infused with an emotional intimacy that draws the reader into uncomfortable empathy with the extremity of their deeds.

Insight Books

Reading this collection by post-feminist, post-modernist, post-punk Rosa Liksom is like being spat at: unpleasant, but shockingly memorable. . . . Short, sharp shocks for modern life.

Rosa Liksom was born in a tiny village comprised of only eight houses in Lapland, Finland, where her parents were reindeer breeders and farmers. She spent her youth traveling throughout Europe, living as a squatter and in communes. She has lived in Copenhagen, Iceland, Paris, Norway, and Moscow. Besides writing fiction, she is also a painter, filmmaker, and cartoonist.

David McDuff has translated the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, and Ivan Turgenev, among others.