With the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in town, Stieg Larsson fever has hit Spokane.  Larsson joins Mankell, Sjöwall, and Wahlöö in making the Swedish thriller/detective story popular with English speaking audiences. The Guardian’s John Crace examines why this genre, discovered by German and French audiences years ago, is all of a sudden so popular in England and America when “The plotlines are bleak, the locations are forbidding and the main characters are usually angst-ridden alcoholics.,” which pretty much sums up how I felt about my family’s holiday parties while growing up in Sweden. (Just kidding mom.)

Since the country has a population of only 9.5 million or so, a lot of the books I read in Swedish had originally been written in a different language. I didn’t realize it then, but that meant that I was exposed to great writers that English audiences were not. (Sweden translates roughly 25% of its books; the UK  translates only 3%.) I never paid much attention to the original titles of those books, but now that I’m seeing some of my favorites from Sweden translated into English, the changes are kind of interesting. Read more »