Brian Evenson reviews Axel Thormählen’s A Happy Man and Other Stories in the Spring 2009 edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

This collection consists of nine stories in all, with English translation and German original offered respectively on the top and bottom of each page. Axel Thormählen, a German writer who lives in Sweden and translates from Swedish to German, writes carefully constructed, almost peaceful sentences that feel at once natural and weightless; the resulting stories have an effortlessness to them that belies the sometimes profound meditations lodged just below their seemingly straightforward surfaces.

The full review is available through The Free Library.