Evil Flowers

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By Gunnhild Øyehaug & Kari Dickson

Publisher Description

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.

26 Reviews

3.0

💫Mrs.Starr💫

Created 21 days ago

Rachael

Created 4 months ago

Olivia

Created 5 months ago

“*3 stars* The way other countries get their entertainment is always so charming to me. It’s so different from American entertainment. This story is plainly European and very bizarre, but in a blunt, poetic way.”

ada

Created 6 months ago

Nora

Created 6 months ago

“I love surrealist art (my entire apartment is literally full of it), but I have a much harder time with surrealist literature. This collection was tremendously weird and had an incredibly distinct—and very Scandinavian—style of writing. The stories would connect and blur together and were self-referential and the narrators were eerily aware. The collection starts with “The Birds,” a story of a woman who loses a bit of her brain during a period and forgets here entire PhD dissertation, which was super odd but I did quite enjoy it. The next few stories in “The Thread” cycle surround a hospital room and a dying woman and queens and lions. “Evil Flowers,” the titular story, didn’t quite work for me but was a story that was a lie and then the real story and then a picture of Baudelaire which flowed into “Protest” which emphasized the vagueness of the royal we. “Escape” was weird and more than a little frightening with a world full of cell pistols and a photograph of a cat come to life and a button mishap. The next story features one of the instances of reanimated death with “The Cliffs, When Dead” which was both kind of sweet to read with the woman finally getting to see this after so long but also sad because her dream was only realized in death. I don’t have much to say about “White Dove Becomes Black Crow” other than its rapid devolution into a meet cute being kind of fun. I’ve been to the National Museum in Oslo but “The Mational Nuseum” seems much more interesting. Gotta respect a gaslighting girlboss. “The Nordics Seen From Outside” painted a nice visual, but I didn’t really care for it. An interesting story of the burden of the modern day internet and the information accompanying it was “Leeches on the Wrong Track” in which leeches eat a fiber optic cable instead and become distressed with learning and go back to sucking blood. Arguably the oddest story here (in a certain kind of way) was “By the Shack” in which three 42 year old authors debate eating a person after a freak plane crash and an environment that keeps changing and may or may not be from a story book. “Digressive Fit” was only two pages long but was honestly pretty funny. I still hate gnats though! “Slime Feels in the Dark” made me slightly sad? though it was nice that the narrator was also disappointed. “Short Monster Analysis” was both kind of real and also a little funny. Big “Smile”by Lily Allen energy. Easily one of my favorites, “A Visit to Monk’s House” was a story of camaraderie via internet and the importance of weird little things and the scariness of new experiences. Emma drunk posting on TripAdvisor makes her a singularly relatable side character. A bittersweet story slightly harking back to the sliminess of the aforementioned story, “The Point” made me want to cry and watch birds. My absolute, absolute favorite, though, was “The Back Door.” It was sad but also a little moving and somehow, in the middle of the oddness, had a lovely discussion on what a soul is. “Protest” protested the sadness of the previous story and “The New Potatoes” was the other instance of the dead come back but this time including the whimsy of an older neighbor and the disappointment of meat gone bad. I did not understand the last, 82 word story “Seconds,” but I appreciate its inclusion nonetheless. Do I understand what I just read—or what I just wrote for that matter? No, but it was generally an enjoyable experience.”

About Gunnhild Øyehaug

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.