Meet the Danes: A Novel
Meet the Danes is a rollicking satire of 1980s American pop culture disastrously transplanted into the unsuspecting nation of Denmark … and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale land will never be the same.
When newlywed but jobless academic Norman McKay follows his wife, Kirsten, back to her homeland, he struggles to fit in—until by chance he gets recruited to help launch Denmark’s first commercial television network, DK2. With programming fueled by Norman’s twisted take on American viewing habits, DK2 sparks a culture war that quickly spirals out of control, sowing confusion, political controversy, violent resistance, and murder. Norman’s increasingly desperate attempts to salvage DK2 and prove his goodwill only end up sabotaging his marriage, incurring a centerfold’s wrath, and provoking U.S. military aggression against its puny NATO ally.
Can Norman pull the plug before it’s too late? Television overtakes reality and reality imitates television as the world’s oldest kingdom careens into surrealistic turmoil.
Mariendal Press, 2020.
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It doesn’t matter, you’ll be okay: A memoir
In a leafy suburban town in Denmark, Mark and Karin buy a picturesque old house that Karin dreams of remodeling—a home for their son, Andreas, to grow up in. Then Karin falls seriously ill.
Weathering a brutal cycle of rekindled hopes and devastating relapses, they persevere with the renovations, bedeviled by a barrage of accidents and problems that the project throws their way. But finishing the job takes on a new and bittersweet significance as Karin exhausts conventional treatments and they are forced to seek alternatives abroad.
It doesn’t matter, you’ll be okay is a poignant story of a family undergoing an ordeal that tests the limits of their resilience and resourcefulness, about the deep human need to create something lasting amidst the precarious uncertainties of life and death—and about how, amidst the shared moments of a lifetime, we become part of one another.
Mariendal Press, 2021.
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The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God and the Popularization of Modernism
This study reconsiders Wyndham Lewis’s adversarial role in the modernist movement through a close reading of his prodigious satire of 1920s cultural politics. It presents a new interpretation of The Apes of God as a Menippean satire, with attention to its style, characterization, allegory, and historiography, and to Lewis’s polemics of the period.
Previous studies have emphasised Lewis’s external method of visual narration and the personal attacks on the London art world. This one also treats the rhetorical and parodic elements in his mechanistic caricatures of literary impressionism and its proponents, besides the theory of participation and the player behind his schizoid image of the modern subject.
The study reinterprets the apprenticeship plot as a carnivalesque discrowning based on the primitive themes of the shaman and the scapegoat. It explores the ways in which the discursive broadcasts—on the social exploitation of a subjectivist aesthetic, publicity as imposture, cultural levelling—are dramatized in the sado-masochistic bond between impresario and naif and in the contradiction of carnival institutionalized. Lewis is shown using his rivals’ mythic method to implicate the avant-garde itself in nascent mass culture.
The study also includes an analysis of the scandal surrounding Lewis’s private edition of The Apes and the defence of non-moral satire presented in his subsequent pamphlet Satire and Fiction. Drawing upon unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, it demonstrates how Lewis’s own devious publicity campaign re-enacted the crux of the novel and epitomized his conflicts with his contemporaries.
Routledge, 1996.
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