He saw that she was a sleepwalker balancing on a slack rope over the abyss. Unbidden, he took it upon himself to be her safety net. They met about a year after she had left the hospital against the doctors’ recommendation. They met, and she stayed with him. He did …

I didn’t know how many days they had kept me in that little windowless closet. Luckily for me I had no tendencies toward claustrophobia because otherwise I could already have been on the verge of a breakdown. I tried to keep my mind alert by thinking about Nathan, the children, …

Tomas Böhm was born in Stockholm in 1945 and is a medical doctor, psychoanalyst, and author. He has published many articles in psychoanalytical journals and is the author of five popular works about psychoanalysis. He has also published five novels. The Vienna Jazz Trio (2000), focusing on the story of …

Marianne Ahrne was born in Lund in 1940. She received her master’s degree from Lund in 1965 and was a student at the Swedish Film Institute school from 1967 to 1969. During the 1970s she directed several films; she is today perhaps equally well known as a film director and …

Per Wästberg was born in 1933 in Stockholm. He published his first prose work, Pojke med såpbubblor (Boy with soap bubbles), as a fifteen-year-old in 1949, received his bachelor of arts degree from Harvard in 1955, and earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala in 1962 with a thesis on the African …

Roland Schütt was born in 1913 in Sweden. His mother, Zipa, is the heroine of the following excerpt, which is the opening of his first book. Born in Russia, she fled to Sweden as a seventeen-year-old and married Roland’s father, Fritiof, who is the hero. Roland spent his working life …

Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden, where he studied philosophy, political science, and journalism and where he has been working as a journalist for Swedish Radio and Television and for major Swedish newspapers. He holds an honorary doctorate from Göteborg University. In 1990 he founded the Swedish monthly …

Joakim Philipson was born in 1958 in Stockholm. He pursued undergraduate studies in the history of ideas, philosophy, mathematics, Russian, and Hebrew at the Universities of Umeå, Stockholm, and Uppsala and has published articles on art, philosophy, and medicine in a number of newspapers and magazines. His novel Tecknet och …

Zenia Marcinkowski was born in the Polish city of Lodz in 1922, the only child of a Jewish barber. When she was seventeen the Nazis invaded and conquered Poland. The two hundred thousand Jews of Lodz ended up in one of the largest ghettos, where many of the healthy were …

One day something happened that was a determining factor in everything I did after that. The boss, who seemed to have developed a certain liking for me, called me in for a confidential talk. He showed me a top-secret report written by two Slovakian Jews, Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg, …