This eclectic collection from 19th- and 20th-century Danish writers enriches our understanding of the city.
There is a wide variety of story styles, from Hans Christian Andersen to the 21st-century novelist, Jakob Ejersbo. There is also a wide variety of themes.
To Catch a Dane pokes bitter fun at the prejudices immigrants often encounter in modern Denmark. The problems of Copenhagen's working-class districts appear in Willadsen, the sad story of an alcoholic and Eggnog, about the insecure child of an uncommunicative mother.
Two of the finest stories are Nightingale by the 19th-century writer, Meir Goldschmidt and Karen Blixen's Conversation One Night in Copenhagen, in which the mad, young 18th-centuryking, Christian VII, converses with Denmark's first great lyric poet, Johannes Ewald, in a room in a whorehouse.
