Suzanne Brogger's work is known in English through translations of her novels The Jade Cat (1997) and the sensational Deliver Us From Love (1976), which was recommended by Henry Miller as the most daring and courageous book since Rabelais. This volume contains her autobiographical meditation "A Fighting Pig's Too Tough to Eat", and a selection of essays from the past twenty years, showing her development from social rebel to iconoclast and visionary. Suzanne Brogger (b. 1944) has always been unconventional in her lifestyle and in her writing, in a way that has often prompted comparison with her fellow countrywoman Karen Blixen. She writes stories, poems, plays and essays, and many of her writings transgress genre boundaries. Her pronouncements and her activities have excited much controversy in Denmark, and her books have been translated into thirteen languages. Beginning as a polemicist, she has matured into a philosophical writer for whom the writing process is a continuous meditation on life, death and eros.

29 January 1912. In a train compartment in Ogden, Utah, a Danish author was found unconscious. The 54-year-old Herman Bang was en route from New York to San Francisco as part of a round-the-world reading tour. It was a poignant end for a man whose life had been spent on the move. Having fled his birthplace on the island of Als ahead of the Prussian advance of 1864, he was later hounded out of Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna and Prague by homophobic laws and hostility to his uncompromising social critique as journalist, novelist, actor and dramaturge. Dorrit Willumsen re-works Bang's life story in a series of compelling flashbacks that unfold during his last fateful train ride across the USA. Along the way, we are transported to an audience in St Petersburg with the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, to a lovers' nest in a flea-ridden Prague boarding house, to the newsrooms and variety theatres of fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, and to a Norwegian mountainside, where Claude Monet has come to paint snow and lauds Bang's writing as literary impressionism. A pioneering journalist, author and dramatist, Herman Bang (1857-1912) was a key figure in Scandinavia's Modern Breakthrough. His major works include Haablose Slaegter (Hopeless Generations, 1880), Stuk (Stucco, 1887) and Tine (Tina, 1889). Dorrit Willumsen's Bang was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize, 1997.