For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries - Sweden, Norway, and Denmark - was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both existed and did not exist. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser's Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of this imagined Scandinavia - first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally as it exists in reality.

A deep dive into Scandinavian crime fiction and Scandinavian culture at large.

About the Author
Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review. She has written one novel and eleven previous works of nonfiction; recent books include Music for Silenced Voices, Why I Read, and You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and the PEN America Award for Research Nonfiction. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Swedish Academy, and numerous other organizations, she currently divides her time between Berkeley, California, and New York City.


Book Information
ISBN 9781250798404
Author Wendy Lesser
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint St Martin's Press
Publisher St Martin's Press