#backstrom

#backstrom

Swedes celebrate the day before on Holy Saturday, with Easter services in the Swedish church often taking place in the evening. This tradition reflects a broader cultural practice of marking holidays the evening before the main day.

Anki King's work suggests an intimate engagement with New Image painting, particularly the later work of Susan Rothenberg, but she took it in a direction that is recognizably hers.

Swedish King Charles XII was down on his luck, defeated by the Russians and camping out in a place called Bender in Moldova, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish sultan was getting tired of the Swedes hanging around on his territory, so Turkish forces crowded into Bender. Mayhem ensued. Charles was forced out. What a kalabalik!

CHARM is built around a large-scale survey of material connected to three major writing centres-Turku, Naantali, and Viipuri-in the 15th century. By comparing charters and book fragments together, the researchers aim to map how writing practices were adopted, modified, and localised, and what that meant for society and administration in a region that was then part of the Swedish realm.

Her writing tends to be classified as virkelighetslitteratur, or "reality fiction," and for good reason. Hjorth makes Norway sound like a small town-the sort of place where your neighbors know you're home if they can see your footsteps in the snow-and the overlap between her life and work has more than once been the literary version of tabloid news there.

Obnoxious jewellery dealer Rodney Manderson has been killed outside the Bowery auction rooms, stabbed through the eye with the Victorian hatpin that his boss, Rose Bowery, has brandished in front of the nation on Bargain Hunt. As she discussed the pin's virtues as a deadly weapon as well as its millinerial uses, the fiercely loyal Rilke decides while feeling grateful to have skipped lunch and trying not to think of jelly to remove it before calling the police.

Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.