Collected Works (& the Rage Against the New)
Everything I wrote in 2025. ✦✧
For as long as I can remember, I have made lists. Annual diaries, daily diaries, to-do lists, can-do lists, spreadsheets of eras, and, of course, the everything lists. It feels so good afterwards, letting the mind rest by summing up what has happened in order to be clear when moving on. Perhaps it is no wonder I ended up working in a museum.
Summarising ten months on Substack might be a little excessive. But I am not the worst offender. That title probably belongs to the dandyish Max Beerbohm, who at the age of twenty-four gathered his early articles and reviews and published them under the title The Works of Max Beerbohm. One hundred and sixty pages, followed by a bibliography compiled by his publisher. As Julian Barnes notes in this brilliant essay in the London Review of Books, it was an audacious way to begin a career.
Then there is the opposite temperament, Gustave Flaubert, not a dandy at all, who at the same age wrote to a friend: “Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea for a fellow not to publish anything until he was fifty, and then, one fine day, to bring out his Collected Works, and afterwards just leave it at that.” He did not know that more than a century later the Swedish writer Lydia Sandgren would debut with that very title.
In a way, it is a small act of resistance not to focus solely on whatever happens to flutter past demanding our attention. The whole of society is built to make us do something else, think of something new. Newspapers, YouTube, Spotify, and also Substack. It is always the latest thing that receives attention. But it does not have to be like that.
In this dispatch I guide you through every post published during 2025, organised by theme to make them easier to navigate (The Bagatelles, The Tiny Bagatelles, The Diary Entries, The Novels, The Short Stories, Naïveté Travels, and the stories behind the paywall). Each story is just as important and just as fresh as when it first appeared. Save my collected works to your e-reader, or print them out and make them immortal.
Two more things:
Michael Maupin interviewed me here. His questions pushed me into deeper reflection. I am always open to talking about my writing, so if you have ideas: please email me.
And I want to understand you a little better ahead of the 2026 season of The Bagatelles. Help me by filling in this form. Everyone who does will receive, in addition to my appreciation, a pdf containing all chapters of Naïveté Travels.
Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt
No patience? Start with this one:
The Art of the Diary
When I’m not writing, I work with other people’s texts at a museum in Stockholm, where I’m involved in contemporary documentation. Yesterday, we launched a diary collection project, an idea I came up with after reading the Swedish theatre director Lars Norén’s diaries and wondering: what if the general public did the same?
Some patience? Ok, let’s dig in …
✦ The Bagatelles ✧
A reflection on the strange luck of getting a second chance at a first beginning, retracing the path from envelope scribbles to blog, to Instagram, to novel, to newsletter, and now into a new language.
✦ The Maybe Man, Charles Swann ✧ A writer tries to catch an idea each morning and drifts into a meditation on Proust’s Charles Swann and the human urge to seek truth through desire.
✦ The Secret Pianist ✧ An anonymous neighbour plays Mozart in a way that transforms the narrator’s evenings, triggering an obsessive search for the pianist’s identity.
✦ The Atheist ✧ The protagonist dies in an apartment fire, leaves the body and ascends through the cosmos.
A dispatch about escaping a Swedish winter by borrowing a life in Seville, and how a borrowed life can open a door into one’s own.
✦ Safari in the realm of wordlessness ✧ A guest at a syndicalist party drifts between posters, bookshelves and improvised investigations when language fails, creating a private adventure in the margins of the room.
✦ At New Year ✧ A quiet winter’s day in Alamillo Park unfolds in sun, birdsong, distant fireworks and the shifting presence of one’s children just outside reach.
✦ Zenonaut’s Diary ✧ A solitary astronaut orbits a collapsing empire, stitching embroidery and watching Earth from afar while waiting for a return that never quite comes.
A return to the kind of writing I once loved and was told to avoid, revisiting the childhood moment when dreamlike storytelling first claimed me.
✦ The Elevator Collector ✧ A diplomat with a lifelong passion for elevators reveals a basement of impossible machines, one of which carries the narrator somewhere entirely unexpected.
✦ The Pencil World ✧ A man devotes decades to documenting every memory on slips of paper, creating an overwhelming archive that becomes a world of its own.
✦ Ingarö’s Magellan ✧ A newcomer joins a local trail group and is sent to scout new paths, only to wander into a territorial dispute that shifts from charming to unsettling.
A defence of the generalist’s mind in a world built for specialists.
✦ Russian Roulette ✧ A numbed narrator slips into an underground Russian roulette club, hoping to feel something again.
✦ Where The Story Ends ✧ Two siblings arrive at their late father’s cluttered country house to clear out decades of accumulated objects.
✦ Free Fall ✧ A ten-year-old’s first seemingly harmless ride in an amusement park turns into a bodily shock so intense it feels like dying.
A meditation on memory’s blind spots and why the truest things we write often spring from what never happened.
✦ The Childhood Friend I Don’t Remember ✧ A man meets someone who remembers their shared childhood vividly, while he himself remembers nothing.
✦ Night Bus to Bombay ✧ An overnight bus journey in India becomes a dim, tense memory that resurfaces years later.
✦ All That Slipped Away ✧ A writing-class exercise forces the narrator to recreate a childhood room. Something long forgotten is pushing back.
A reflection on the old childhood habit of staring at maps. The strange joy of discovering that those imagined places now write back.
✦ Hermelin’s Insight ✧ A wandering aristocrat finds purpose late in life by translating Persian poetry in a psychiatric ward.
✦ The Beringians ✧ A portrait of the people who lived on the vanished land bridge between Asia and North America.
✦ The Flight Attendant’s Diary ✧ A cabin crew member secretly writes during long-haul flights, imagining the lives she might have lived in other dimensions.
A defence of letting the so-called Serious Literary Author write fast, weird and a little unhinged, allowing everyday life to tilt closer to Groucho Marx than Marcel Proust.
✦ Stellan Skarsgård’s Netflix ✧ A man realises he has accidental access to Stellan Skarsgård’s Netflix account and slowly lets this secret privilege reshape his social life.
✦ Eva4ever ✧ A routine scam email exposes a very real password, forcing a husband to confront the fact that he has been quietly typing an old love’s name every day of his married life.
✦ The Sabrage Course ✧ A group of tired middle-aged men attend a champagne-sabre course led by a duelling-obsessed Austrian.
A meditation on memento mori through Grim Fandango and its skeletal guide Manny Calavera, considering how to live well in limbo.
✦ Obituary ✦ A grieving son is tasked with writing his mother’s obituary and realises he barely knew her inner life, sending him on a search for someone who might hold the missing pieces.
✦ Change ✧ A woman sheds her earthly body and chooses a new identity from a celestial catalogue.
✦ The Last Impression ✦ A man recalls a brief encounter with a woman at a party, only to learn later of her death, leaving him with a last impression that becomes strangely permanent.
A milestone dispatch about starting over in a new language and finding an unexpected global readership (written in the afterglow of passing one thousand subscribers).
✦ 95 Years of Jealousy ✦ A psychologist mentions ninety-five-year-olds tormented by jealousy, prompting the narrator to imagine the lifetimes of longing, betrayal and private narratives.
✦ The Prodigies ✧ Two young musicians, both lifelong prodigies, fail an audition in Montpellier and share an afternoon of bruised pride.
✦ A Crow Named Rich ✦ A rescued fledgling becomes a beloved household companion, mimicking voices and joining games.
About my father’s cousin Ola Hermanson. He was the rock star, the scientist, the label founder, and the football sufferer. This is a small tribute to the person who taught me how large a life can be.
✦ The Doppelgängers ✧ A theatre critic discovers that someone identical to him has already collected his ticket and taken his seat.
✦ The Venice of the North ✧ After a meteor shower turns Stockholm’s streets into waterways, a non-swimmer must navigate a flooded city and an unexpected sense of resilience.
✦ Through the Eyes of a Pickpocket ✧ A young drifter teams up with a veteran thief, until a stolen letter forces both to confront the human cost of their craft.
A meeting with my American relatives, descendants of Ossian who emigrated over a century ago, leads to brief reflections on ancestry and a past period living with my grandmother.
✦ Gurli ✧ A portrait of an eight-year-old girl who died becomes a map of generational trauma and inherited anxiety.
✦ When Passion Fades ✧ A relationship shifts in a single passing gesture, when one body turns away and the other realises the gravitational pull between them has changed.
✦ The Endless Construction ✧ A boy on the run meets a hermit building an ever-expanding house in the forest.
A reflection on personal AI boundaries and why writing must remain a private territory.
✦ The Bill Murray of the National Library ✧ A man spends a summer trapped in a single date from 1983, searching old newspapers for meaning.
✦ Stool Psychosis ✧ A woodworking student becomes engulfed in a mania of identical stools, testing the narrator’s composure.
✦ The Dream Archive ✧ After a massage unlocks a strange pressure point, dreams begin flooding back in overwhelming detail, as if an entire hidden archive has been accidentally opened.
A dispatch about searching for belonging in adulthood and stumbling into a very particular community: the bell ringers of Björkhagen.
✦ The Bell Ringers ✧ A summer among volunteer campanologists, where a child prodigy of bells, an artist mother and a talkative ex-sailor orbit the St John’s bell.
✦ Venting ✧ A drunk man hijacks the altar to shout his truths, only to be gently redirected by a young woman who listens long enough for him to feel human again.
✦ Monotony’s Pattern ✧ A former bank security guard and bell ringer recalls how boredom rewired his mind.
✦ The Tiny Bagatelles ✧
A dispatch presenting twenty-eight very short surreal bagatelles, introduced through a reflection on falling asleep by inventing stories at the edge of consciousness.
✦ The Diary Entries✧
A post about how strangers gravitate toward you, and how the most ordinary days become tiny epics when you stay open to the people passing through your life.
✦ Everyone’s Talking to Me ✧ A heat-struck day of buses and trains turns into a cascade of encounters with talkative strangers, each revealing something unexpected.
✦ The Stalker’s Lair ✧ A memory from a long-ago Central Asian Studies course resurfaces, leading to a classmate’s sparsely furnished flat.
✦ The Other Dad ✧ Two divorced fathers sending their children home alone from Málaga end up sharing a drive.
A dispatch about why people write things down, and how diaries become maps of the self. From museum work with thousands of private voices to three intimate entries of my own
✦ A Bit Like George Saunders ✧ A narrator wrestles with admiration, inhibition and accidental kinship after being told his writing resembles Saunders.
✦ Ingemar ✧ A meditation on a friend lost too early, and on how everyday errands, wars, dishwashers and new lives crowd out grief until the memory itself begins to thin.
✦ The Whistlers ✧ A football-stadium moment where a Rossini whistle becomes a duet, then a mystery.
✦ The short stories ✧
A story about trying to return to a year that once felt like the future, revisiting an old flat, and an old self.
A tale about turning forty-two, seeing death up close for the first time in Trieste and being briefly, unnervingly unsure where the border runs between the living and the dead.
✦ The Novels (behind paywall) ✧
✦ BARDO NOIR ✧ A man escapes his life and hides in Kathmandu, where he is drawn into a secretive bureau that guides travellers toward a mythical valley. When a woman named Florence arrives, his past, his identity and the bureau’s true purpose collide.
✦ ZENOPOLIS ✧ A novel about Manuel El Milagro Peláez Sigüenza, a boy raised in a world of women in San Jerónimo, Spain, who grows up believing he is a miracle child. As he begins to question the myths surrounding his family, including the story of his missing father, he discovers traces of a parallel inner world called Zenopolis.
Get automatic access to Bardo Noir and Zenopolis by becoming a paid subscriber.
✦ Naïveté Travels ✧
Naïveté Travels is a story about a young man who becomes fixated on Jan Berger, a once-legendary Swedish dot-com figure he meets in a Belgrade bar. Their brief encounter turns into years of pursuit, self-invention and misdirection, as the narrator tries to become someone larger than the life he’s living.
First three chapters open, the last two behind a paywall (get them for free by filling in the form).
✦ Stories behind the paywall ✧
A dispatch about the long, strange aftermath of breaking one’s brain, where collapse becomes a kind of rebirth and patience the only way forward.
✦ Portrait of a Recovery ✧ A man describes how every mental wire snapped and was reattached in a new order, until daily life slowly returned with a different compass.
✦ A Phone Call in the Garden ✧ An old phone booth rings from 1983, and the person who answers ends up speaking to his own birth.
✦ The Drifters ✧ A library becomes home to a searching youth, until a strange book begins to write itself.
About a man processing address labels in a windowless postal cave who discovers that a package suddenly carries his own name.
A dispatch about returning to Bergman’s island, and confronting the creative intensity of living inside the director’s rooms.
A short-story about a man on the edge who wanders into a Södermalm boxing club and stumbles into a brutal, tender almost-love.
A short novel about a museum worker who drifts into a dream-logic conspiracy involving László Bíró, occult diaries and a shadowy group called The Electric Committee.
Thank you for reading,
Jörgen Löwenfeldt ✦ jorgenlowenfeldt.se
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I say go for it. Why not?
Pretty sure my grandmother had that exact same typewriter. Now my niece has it. It smells like ink.