After the Sun
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Relentlessly thrilling . . . an orgy of the unpredictable.” —New York Times Book Review
“Like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. . . . surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion.” —Wall Street Journal
From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world.
Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine.
After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—“as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer's words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Five surreal, globe-spanning stories shape Eika's startling English-language debut. The collection begins and ends with stories named "Bad Mexican Dog," each of which recounts the travails of an otherworldly beach boy and the Cancún tourists he exploits and vice versa. In "Alvin," an unnamed IT specialist scarred by his ex-wife's abandonment embarks upon an illusive and homoerotic friendship with an eccentric derivatives trader while on assignment in Denmark. In "Rachel, Nevada," a man mourning the deaths of his two daughters self-mutilates in ritualistic communion with a piece of alien shrapnel found in the desert. In "Me, Rory and Aurora," a homeless woman inserts herself in the lives of a drug-dealing couple about to have a baby. Studded with shockingly visceral images ("Suddenly his windpipe popped out of the wet flesh, distended and fluted with cartilage"), these lyrical stories are preoccupied with a sense of psychosexual loneliness that penetrates even the most absurd moments of escapism. Eika's fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula.
