Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful.

Olga Ravn

In the sixteenth century, on the island of Hven, the pioneering Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, is undertaking a momentous study of the night sky

Included in the Available Titles catalog

Sublunar

Fiction by Harald Voetmann

Translated from Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen

Alternatingly told by Brahe and his assistants—a filthy cast of characters—Sublunar is both novel and almanac. When not engaged in acts of rampant sexual deviancy, drunken debauchery, or routine spankings, these peculiar helpers and their choleric and capricious master—Brahe, having lost his nose in a duel, is considered the most illustrious noseless man of his time—take painstaking measurements that will revolutionize astronomy, all before the invention of the telescope. Meanwhile, Brahe's hapless peers Erik Lange and Falk Gøye toil away at preposterous and doomed tasks: a commentary on the Apocalypse, and the alchemical creation of gold. And across Europe, the plague rages on...

The second novel in a trilogy, Sublunar is as visceral, absurd, and tragic as its predecessor, Awake, but with a special nocturnal glow and a lunatic-edged gaze trained on the moon and the stars.

Paperback(published Aug, 01 2023)

ISBN
9780811229784
Price US
15.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
128

Ebook

ISBN
9780811229791
Portrait of Harald Voetmann

Harald Voetmann

Danish writer

Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful.

Olga Ravn

Voetmann’s saturnine imagery touches both ends of the optic nerve, intermingling what is seen with what is known… Marvelous.

Trevor Quirk, The Baffler

Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel—or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves—each scarcely more than a hundred pages— are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendour.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, The New York Review of Books

A brilliant novel. Visceral and lyrical, entertaining and provoking, Voetmann evokes a dazzling world.

Sjón

Arresting and memorable.

Kirkus Reviews

Original, piercing, and richly exhilarating. Voetmann’s text is a sharp reminder of how powerfully and succinctly well-chosen words can create a world, render experiences, and express thoughts—in short, transport us, to places and in ways we could not have imagined.

Claire Messud, Harper's