Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex — but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations

Joining Rome, Paris, Istanbul, London, and Dublin as European hosts for the Akashic Noir series, Copenhagen Noir features brand-new stories from a top-notch crew of Danish writers, with several Swedish and Norwegian writers thrown into the mix. This volume definitively reveals why Scandinavian crime fiction has come to be so popular across the world. Includes brand-new stories by: Naja Marie Aidt, Jonas T. Bengtsson, Helle Helle, Christian Dorph and Simon Pasternak, Susanne Staun, Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis, Klaus Rifbjerg, Gretelise Holm, Georg Ursin, Kristian Lundberg, Kristina Stoltz, Seyit Öztürk, Benn Q. Holm, and Gunnar Staalesen

"The emotions unleashed in this tale. . are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners." — Radhika Jones, Time Naja Marie Aidt's long-awaited first novel is a breathtaking page-turner and complex portrait of a man whose life slowly devolves into one of violence and jealousy. Rock, Paper, Scissors opens shortly after the death of Thomas and Jenny's criminal father. While trying to fix a toaster that he left behind, Thomas discovers a secret, setting into motion a series of events leading to the dissolution of his life, and plunging him into a dark, shadowy underworld of violence and betrayal. A gripping story written with a poet's sensibility and attention to language, Rock, Paper, Scissors showcases all of Aidt's gifts and will greatly expand the readership for one of Denmark's most decorated and beloved writers. Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon (Two Lines Press), which received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and the Danish Critics Prize for Literature. Rock, Paper, Scissors is her first novel