The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body

What if your first true love broke all known taboos? What if your very first romance drowned you in a whirlpool of transgression? A coming-of-age novel that is minutely in tune with the perversions of its narrator’s body, The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body defines category. The desperate account of a teenage boy in love with a much older riding instructor, it follows the unforgettable Bjorn as he pushes his flesh to its very limits, annihilating boundaries of gender and sexuality in a search for impossible gratification.

A feverish combination of stream of conscious, autobiography, collage, and narrative, Skin marks the arrival of a truly original literary voice. It is as omnivorous as the bodies within it, as unrestrained as the appetites, terrors, and trystings that celebrated author Bjorn Rasumssen evokes in poetic detail. Deeply emotional, erotic, elegiac, and pansexual, it caresses the wounds we visit upon our flesh and soul in an attempt to serve the urges of the body’s largest organ—the skin that covers and defines us.

Bjorn Rasmussen was born in 1983 and graduated from the Danish Playwright School in 2007 and from the Danish Writers’ School in 2011. He received the Montana Literary Award in 2011 for The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body, was awarded a three-year work grant from the Danish government in 2013, and received the Kultur Bornholms Literary Award in 2014.

Martin Aitken is a widely published translator of Danish literature. He received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize in 2012. He has translated numerous books, including Dorthe Nors’ Karate Chop, and he co-translated volume 6 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle with Don Bartlett.