Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, a nom de plume used by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It is also a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then translated it into Danish.
The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern by Lilian Jackson Braun
Qwilleran is not happy with his new assignment to write about interior decorating in a new weekly magazine. Then someone burgles the residence featured on the front cover and kills the lady of the house. Suddenly, Quill finds himself and his feline friend in the midst of a murder investigation.
Danish Fairy Tales by Sven Grundtvig translated by J. Grant Cramer (Rare Book Collection)
Fourteen traditional Danish tales of wizardry, witchery, dark forests, remote kingdoms, princesses, and wicked stepmothers.
These folk-tales, and many more, were originally collected by Svendt Grundtvig, a Danish professorand philologist. He found that throughout all the country districts, men and women were telling stories and reciting ballads that they had learned from their grandmothers, who, in their turn, had heard them from crooners of old songs, and tellers of old tales. Professor Grundtvig realized that these echoes of an earlier time were precious; that, if they were not perpetuated in written form, they would be lost. It was a labour of love on his part to collect these tales; a labor that lasted over twenty years, and that enlisted the aid of many of his countrymen. Grundtvig says that he has kept the simplicity and artlessness of the oral tradition; and that, in the case of varying versions from different parts of the country, he has taken the purer and more complete form, but has always preserved the epic unity.
