'Askildsen's dry, absurd humour is not unlike that of Beckett... His short stories are packed with irony, and the dialogue is sharp and expressive' TLS\nSpare, taut and told with flashes of pitch-black humour, the short stories of Norwegian master Kjell Askildsen capture all the strangeness of modern existence. In this selection of tales, spanning the whole of his brilliant career, unnerving encounters occur, lonely individuals try to connect, families and relationships are fractured, and we are confronted by the fragility and absurdity of life.\n'Full of compelling strangeness. Lives surge through a few brittle pages, suppressed loves and resentments threaten to erupt' Independent

Everything Like Before: Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Askildsen, Kjell

Short Stories & Anthologies

Penguin Classics

A man and a woman in an isolated house, surrounded by nothing, or nearly nothing; besieged by urban desert or actual wilderness, by alcohol, cigarettes, and ghosts; by mothers, fathers, and lovers who have disappeared... Written in a seemingly unadorned style, with flashes of pitch-black humor, Askildsen's devastating stories convey in few words a portrait of life and thought as they are actually experienced, balanced between despair and hope, memories and expectations. He is recognized as one of the greatest Norwegian writers of the twentieth century, and among the greatest short-story authors of all time.

Selected Stories (Norwegian Literature)

Literary

Dalkey Archive Press

The first English translation of Askildsen's best writing from a 40-year period. Askildsen (b. 1929) first came to prominence in Norwegian literature in the 1950s with his Kafkaesque accounts of alienated individuals in a hostile environment. His reputation has grown since and he is now recognized as a major author. A recent translation of Askildsen's writing into French invited comparison with Beckett.

A Sudden Liberating Thought

Dufour Editions

Contemporary

Star Calendars

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing. A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café -- Kjell Askildsen's characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.

Everything Like Before: Stories

United States

Archipelago

No soy así: (Cuentos 1983-2008)

Genre Fiction

Nórdica Libros

Cuentos / Stories (Business class) (Spanish Edition)

Lengua de Trapo

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