Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Gentlemen – Klas Östergren

A literary celebration of Sweden’s battered, punch-drunk idea of the perfect gentleman.

Beaten up, bruised, and scared, a young writer hides in a Stockholm apartment, writing the story of its disappeared inhabitants: the flamboyant and charismatic Morgan brothers.

It all began a year earlier, when he was rooming with Henry Morgan, a boxer, piano player, composer, bartender, and old-fashioned gentleman with a Gatsby-like capacity for turning life into a feast and absolutely no talent for keeping secrets.

The two friends led the high-life in Stockholm until the day Henry’s younger brother Leo — a star poet, drunk, political provocateur — showed up. Leo drags them into a scandal involving illegal weapons and gangsters, and soon the three men find themselves unwittingly and irreversibly trapped in a dangerous plot. (MacAdam Cage Publishing)

”Written with an intense regard for storytelling and style, Gentlemen is the most important literary work to emerge from Sweden in the past thirty years – simultaneously celebrating and mourning the post-WWII era with its jazz music, poetry, hidden treasures, and espionage.” (www.BookLounge.ca)

Gangsters – Klas Östergren

Gangsters continues where Gentlemen left off. Henry Morgan, the flamboyant hedonist in Gentlemen has disappeared. His lover, Maud, reveals to the author that she’s pregnant with Henry’s child. When Klas tries to track down Henry, he’s threatened by the Emissary, a mysterious government official, who makes it clear that Klas should stop working on his current project, or else… Klas is in fact writing a book about Henry and his brother Leo, called Gentlemen. Out of fear, Klas decides to hush up the true story of Henry and Leo and make the characters unrecognizable. After Maud’s death many years later, her son calls on Klas for help when the mother of his unborn child disappears. When Klas meets the girl’s father, he discovers that he is connected to the Emissary. Klas loses his grip on the situation and discovers that the demons from his past are still roaming the streets of Stockholm.

Gangsters, a dark and claustrophobic masterpiece, is the perfect follow-up to Gentlemen: everyone manipulates everyone else, everyone is lied to and in the end, no one escapes their fate.

“Östergren is the absolute master.” (Aftonbladet)

Astrids Bilder

Astrid Lindgren’s life in pictures

According to editor Jacob Forsell, this picture book is simply a life described in pictures of a dearly loved woman, who gladly let herself be photographed in all possible situations. The first part of the book contains a letter by Astrid Lindgren herself, entitled ‘The country that disappeared’, in which she writes about her childhood, her family and agricultural life in Småland a century ago. The second part is composed of a large selection of pictures from her life, her childhood, her husband children, her work, her friends, the movies made out of her books, her examples, children playing, Lindgren portraits by different artists, the role of the author in our society and old age. Margarete Strömstedt, Lindgren’s biographer, wrote the epilogue. Together, all these images form an ode to one of the most talented children’s authors, who has been an example and an inspiration to many other writers.