Be careful what you wish for, literary ladies!

Two classic authors' complicated relationship with fans and fame

Hello! For this Sunday edition of Literary Ladies Lite Copenhagen, where, as I mentioned last week here and in my other Substack (The Vegan Atlas), I’m doing two weeks of cat-sitting in exchange for an apartment.

Since I’m a complete nerd, my primary travel activities are finding vegan food, browsing bookstores and libraries, and going to museums. Today, my daughter and I went to Malmö, Sweden, which is only a bit over an hour from Copenhagen by train. Sweden’s third largest city is fascinating and diverse. Even the shopping mall in the center of town is an experience.

We stopped in a bookstore (I forgot to note the name) that had a philosophy/social justice vibe. Chatting with the owner, I asked whether there has ever been book banning in Sweden. He thought for a while, then replied that there may have been an incident in the 1890s (!) when Strindberg wrote about divorce. But he wasn’t even sure about that. I poked around and indeed, there seems to be no book banning in Sweden.

Meanwhile, PEN America reports that Tennessee has purged school libraries of hundreds of titles, including certain books by Mary Pope Osborne (Magic Tree House), Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic), and Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes). This is a subject for another day. There’s no end to the American book banning mania.

T’challa is looking over my chapters and notes. He thinks I still have a lot of work to do.

During this sojourn in Denmark, I still need to work each day, especially since I have a forthcoming deadline. The book I’m working on now is tentatively titled Women Writing Dangerously. If you’re interested in following my progress, I just started documenting in my Notes the process of how a messy draft will become a beautiful book about an important subject (to be published in Sept. 2026), thanks to my publishers’ team.

So onto the subject at hand …