Danish Translation of The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)
OK, this is primarily for people who live in Denmark, or who know other people who live in Denmark, or who are Danish but are living somewhere else at the moment, or who are going to be in Copenhagen on the evening of September 30th, regardless of whether they are Danish or not.
The Danish translation of my latest book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), published by Det Poetiske Bureaus Forlag (“The Poetic Bureau Publishing House”), an independent book publisher in Copenhagen, will be officially released that evening at the Det Poetiske Bureaus bookshop at an official book-release-type event that will also be their 15th anniversary celebration. Details are on their Facebook page.
I’ll be there, in Copenhagen, to take part in the festivities and sign a few books. Join us if you can!
That’s it ... I’m not going to blather on this time, other than to thank the publisher, Henrik Hjulgaard, and the translator, Pål Tvärsom, and all the rest of Det Poetiske Bureaus Forlag’s team. The book has been banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands, and Amazon has slapped an “advisory” on it in the USA, UK, Canada, France, Italy, and probably everywhere else, prompting readers to visit the CDC (or whatever serves as the CDC in their country) “for the latest information on COVID-19 and vaccines,” and is generally causing a bit of controversy, so hats off to these Danish folks for having the balls to publish this translation!
OK, that’s really it this time. Join us in Copenhagen on the 30th if you can, or tell your friends in Copenhagen to do so. Here’s a translation of the announcement …
Det Poetiske Bureaus Forlag — 20 September, 2022
“We have done it a few times before and we will do it again [on 30 September] when we publish one of those kinds of controversial books few other Danish publishers dare to commit to.
We began with Poems from Guantanamo in 2008, when a series of prisoners protested their unlawful and unlawful detention in poetic form — since then they have all been released, without ever being charged, to deafening silence.
We continued with John Pilger's Freedom Next Time in 2010, a devastating critique of the Afghanistan war — which has since been acknowledged as an "innocent mistake."
In 2020 we published Iranian Mahvash Sabet's Prison Poems, which was very successfully performed at the Royal Theatre with Karen-Lise Mynster. Mahvash Sabet has now been imprisoned again for his constant fight for the rights of his religious community.
Now comes The New Normal Reich, by the American playwright and satirist C.J. Hopkins. In this collection of essays from 2020-2021, the author challenges the response to the Covid pandemic by governments around the world and questions whether there is more to it than a simple response to a public health crisis. The book has been banned by Amazon in a number of countries and thus also enters the contemporary history of private mega-corporations exerting influence and power over free expression. And yet Amazon has not felt itself too pure to make a lot of money off it — it has been on Amazon’s bestseller lists for political literature in, among other places, Canada.
C.J. Hopkins will be in Copenhagen himself and present the book at the publisher on the 30th September.
Danish Translation of The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021)
Congratulations! Having a book banned by these forces has to be the highest complement. I want to read it.
This collection should be bought in physical form for access to the footnotes. Consisting mostly of citations to media headlines, they make a hilarious stand-alone read. (Essays are good, too.)