The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, Jennifer Russell

Strange, macabre, and unsettling: Short stories from the Danish master of absurdist fiction

In the four stories that make up The Dolls, characters are plagued by unexplained illnesses, boils, paralysis, and frostbite. A big sister descends into a basement. Another sister denies her younger brother. A third sister with memory loss is on the run, seeking shelter at Notpla. A fourth set of siblings travel to Hungary with their late mother in a coffin. They each have a different version of their mother’s story. In Scavenius’s chilling and excruciatingly seductive universe, nothing can be said to be true anymore. After all, anything can be propaganda today.