![Copenhagen Tales](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/LS5YXBYFAYLDWL6SU53P2BJ3JQ.jpg?smart=true&auth=5f03f08c7abca094ea7da66ae254d3f7073eb03d8993724a497ad2a9cd0ee75e&width=105)
This eclectic collection from 19th- and 20th-century Danish writers enriches our understanding of the city.
There is a wide variety of story styles, from Hans Christian Andersen to the 21st-century novelist, Jakob Ejersbo. There is also a wide variety of themes.
To Catch a Dane pokes bitter fun at the prejudices immigrants often encounter in modern Denmark. The problems of Copenhagen's working-class districts appear in Willadsen, the sad story of an alcoholic and Eggnog, about the insecure child of an uncommunicative mother.
![](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/MCQWQ2M3C2TJSLGUQZHQGJ7TIU.jpg?auth=079c753570c514bfda2d6b16dd7d8ee5ad73b86360dc7c1998cf9f278f86824b&width=800&height=450)
Two of the finest stories are Nightingale by the 19th-century writer, Meir Goldschmidt and Karen Blixen's Conversation One Night in Copenhagen, in which the mad, young 18th-centuryking, Christian VII, converses with Denmark's first great lyric poet, Johannes Ewald, in a room in a whorehouse.