Showing results by author "Gunnhild Oyehaug" in All Categories

Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her own voice, but when she falls in love with an older, established author, she finds herself overwhelmed by his ideas and lifestyle. Trine, an outrageous performance artist, has recently and reluctantly become a mother, but is finding it increasingly difficult to balance the care of her child with her outsized ambitions. Linnea is an aspiring director scouting filming locations in Copenhagen, but her hopelessly smitten producer already knows that this movie will never be made.

In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Gunnhild Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud's thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical.

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, and a new museum sinks into the ground.