A Happy Man and Other Stories

Fiction. Translated from the German by Marianne Thormahlen. Introduction by Judith Freeman. A HAPPY MAN AND OTHER STORIES OR/ODER DER GLUCKLICHE UND ANDERE ERZAHLUNGEN draws together nine small fictions by German author Axel Thormahlen. Jochen, the titles story's hero, is a man content in the face of others' discontent and their foolish fear of mortality. Like Jochen, many of Thormahlen's characters live in deceptively simple, but impossibly profound movements, accepting the happy limits of life. Judith Freeman asks in her introduction, "though we are drained, hunted to death, and out of breath, is [Jochen] not still, are we not all, happy men?" Thormahlen's great achievement is that his stories move as much toward the answer as the question, but in the end leave both untouched and unrelenting. A HAPPY MAN AND OTHER STORIES is published as part of the TrenchArt Parapet series, officially translated by Marianne Thormahlen, with an introduction by Judith Freeman and visual art by Danielle Adair.

Axel Thormaehlen was born in Northern Germany just after the end of World War II. A trained bookseller, he has lived in a village in the south of Sweden for most of his life but still writes in German. Thormaehlen has published four novels and two collections of short stories in German and Swedish.