"A new short story collection from international literary star Gunnhild ¢yehaug"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

A section of a woman’s brain slips into a toilet and removes her ability to identify birds and medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables in a collection of madcap short stories from the author of Knots. 15,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Present Tense Machine and Knots, a collection of playfully surreal stories about love, death, and metamorphosis.

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.

In her new collection, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis’s observation that her “every story [is] a formal surprise, smart and droll.” These tales converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, slime eels, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A fairly large part of a woman’s brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize species of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information through fiberoptic cables, and 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.

Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, followed in 2018 by Wait, Blink, which was adapted into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts, and in 2022 by Present Tense Machine. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Her translation of Brown, written by Håkon Øvreås and illustrated by Øyvind Torseter, won the 2020 Mildred L. Batchelder Award. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian studies department at the University of Edinburgh.

Booklist Reviews

Øyehaug (Present Tense Machine, 2022) stuns with this delightful, refreshing, read-in-one-sitting short story collection that's sure to be unlike anything else you'll pick up this year. Øyehaug surprises the reader with every word, using various forms and narrative structures and impressing with each. The stories are especially self-referential, and while each work can stand on its own, it is also part of a whole, creating a cohesive and wonderfully odd collection. "The Thread" and its related stories are particularly stirring, as the author uses intentional language to create a "thread" connecting each piece. Other stories showcase Øyehaug's poetic talents; at just one page, Seconds tells a tale that some novels don't accomplish. Simply put, Øyehaug continues to excite, and fans of her previous works—particularly Knots (2017), her earlier collection of short fiction—will find this thread an exciting one to follow. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

In this charming and inventive collection, Øyehaug (Knots) plays with narrative conventions to dazzling effect, braiding jokes with earnest accounts of heartbreak. In "Birds," an ornithologist loses all her memories of birds, jeopardizing her career but recapturing the joy she once found in bird-watching with her family. The four competing narratives of the "Thread" series place a lonely, elderly woman in a room with a hungry lion. In "Thread 2," a Greek chorus intervenes, playfully urging the author to give the encounter a happy ending. In "Short Monster Analysis," a woman wonders whether holding a 20-year grudge against a cruel lover makes her the monster in the story. And in the mysterious "By the Shack," three women writers become trapped in a children's book after a plane crash, where they live in a shack beneath stars that "click into place" in the sky. Charles Baudelaire, Inger Christensen, and Virginia Woolf are touchstones throughout, and in "Wish, Dream, Observation," the narrator takes a crack at Henrik Ibsen's constant presence in Norway, even when he is "not there." Øyehaug often takes a postmodern swerve, highlighting how stories can be used to distance readers from their emotions but also to acknowledge and process them. This scintillating collection shouldn't be missed. (Feb.)