Search results for ""Author Gunnhild Øyehaug""

Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear artistic vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters’ stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous. Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique brew that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink - her first novel to be translated into English - is a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.

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In Evil Flowers, a precise but madcap collection of short stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange, startling brilliance of everyday life. Across twenty-five stories, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis's observation that her every story is "a formal surprise, smart and droll." The stories converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, hagfish, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A section of a woman's brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize types of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables; a new museum sinks into the ground. Inspired by Charles Baudelaire, a dreamer and romantic in the era of realism, Øyehaug revolts against the ordinary, reaching instead for the wonder to be found in fantasy and absurdity. Brimming with wit, ingenuity, and irrepressible joy, these stories mark another triumph from a dazzling international writer.

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On an ordinary day in Bergen, Norway, in the late 1990s, Anna is reading in the garden while her two-year-old daughter, Laura, plays on her tricycle. Then, in one startling moment, Anna misreads a word, an alternate universe opens up, and Laura disappears. Twenty years or so later, life has gone on as if nothing happened. In each of the women's lives, however, something is not quite right. Both Anna and Laura continue to exist, but they are invisible to each other and forgotten in each other's worlds. Both are writers and amateur pianists. Both are married; Anna had two more children after Laura disappeared, and Laura is expecting a child of her own. They worry about their families, their jobs, the climate-and whether this reality is all there is. In the exquisite, wistful, slyly profound Present Tense Machine, Gunnhild Øyehaug delivers another dazzling renovation of what fiction can do, a testament to the fact that language shapes the world.

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