Dark Paradise

A man murders a grocer over fifteen cents--but in the sharp, icy prose and detached tone that defines this collection, his crime seems neither sensational nor entirely reprehensible. Rosa Liksom populates a world of snow-covered landscapes, antiseptic apartments, fish factories, and lumber camps with the obsessive, the violent, and the unhinged. A woman refuses to leave prison until she has served her entire sentence. A man obsessively cleans his apartment as his life moves on around him. A woman kills her new husband over his neediness and inability to leave their bed.