Set in an imaginary medical institute, The Animal Doctor (Djurdoktorn) describes a not unforeseeable world dominated by administrative science and social technology. The human beings and the research animals face the same predicament: both can be observed, controlled, and thrown into mazes. When Evy Beck joins the institute as a veterinarian she innocently enters into combat with a wily and impenetrable bureaucracy. She has the considerable help of P. C. Jersild. His first novel, published in Sweden in 1973, has not lost its bite in this English translation by David Mel Paul and Margareta Paul.

The Animal Doctor

Jersild, P. C.

Pantheon Books

Thirty years after a nuclear holocaust has virtually destroyed the world, Edvin, the youngest survivor, born during the war, joins a group of survivors gathered on a barren island in the Baltic, where living conditions mirror those of the Middle Ages

After the Flood

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

William Morrow & Co.

First published in Sweden in 1976, Children’s Island increased the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild. The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone, has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. 
Children’s Island is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in not going to summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty, sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy he needs to find the answers to life’s dilemmas. He lulls his divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the task of supporting his love for McDonald’s hamburgers. What he finds in Stockholm—a kind of Children’s Island all its own—is a series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define contemporary society. It’s a society of isolation, violence, and aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening to Reine’s psyche and well-being than the changes taking place within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls Children’s Island “an extremely entertaining, extremely funny, and very serious book.”

Children's Island (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation)

Literature & Fiction

University Of Nebraska Press

In House of Babel (Babels Hus), the experience of a heart attack victim illustrates the depersonalization and outrageous cost of medical treatment today. Formerly a doctor, P.C. Jersild brings a powerful realism to his picture of a modern hospital. His literary gifts are apparent in a narrative that maintains dramatic intensity while it suggests solutions to an urgent social problem. This edition marks the novel's first appearance in English.

House of Babel (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation) (English and Swedish Edition)

Tate, Joan

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

First published in Sweden in 1976, Children’s Island increased the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild. The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone, has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Children’s Island is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in not going to summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty, sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy he needs to find the answers to life’s dilemmas. He lulls his divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the task of supporting his love for McDonald’s hamburgers. What he finds in Stockholm—a kind of Children’s Island all its own—is a series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define contemporary society. It’s a society of isolation, violence, and aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening to Reine’s psyche and well-being than the changes taking place within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls Children’s Island “an extremely entertaining, extremely funny, and very serious book.”

In House of Babel (Babels Hus), the experience of a heart attack victim illustrates the depersonalization and outrageous cost of medical treatment today. Formerly a doctor, P.C. Jersild brings a powerful realism to his picture of a modern hospital. His literary gifts are apparent in a narrative that maintains dramatic intensity while it suggests solutions to an urgent social problem. This edition marks the novel's first appearance in English.

Contemporary

Univ of Nebraska Pr

The protagonist of this mild satire - is a human brain floating in an aquarium - The bodiless Ypsilon, expected to be an unemotional intellect, feels lonely. Beause he is lovesick over a pretty lab assistant, Ypsilon chooses not to respond to elaborate educational regiments - With the aid of a chimpanzee and a detached human hand, he makes detailed plans for an impractical escape - Amusing and phantasmagoric.--Publishers Weekly. ""Thanks to [Lesser], Ypsilon has become as convincing and many-facetted to the English-speaking audience as he is to his Swedish readers, and the ethical and wider human problems posed by his situation have become just as urgent.""--Swedish Book Review.

A Living Soul (Norvik Press Series B No 5) (English and Swedish Edition)

Norvik Pr

Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid. Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation - to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own, the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself remains intact.

A Living Soul (Series B)

Genre Fiction

Norvik Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jersild, P. C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jersild, P. C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jersild, P. C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Animal Doctor

After the Flood

Children's Island (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation)

House of Babel (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation) (English and Swedish Edition)

The Animal Doctor

Children's Island (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation)

House of Babel (Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation) (English and Swedish Edition)

The Animal Doctor

A Living Soul (Norvik Press Series B No 5) (English and Swedish Edition)

A Living Soul (Series B)