Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel (Paperback)

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Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel By Gunnhild Øyehaug, Kari Dickson (Translated by) Cover Image

Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life: A Novel (Paperback)

By Gunnhild Øyehaug, Kari Dickson (Translated by)

$17.00


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Staff Reviews


First of all I’m sorry but can you just pick this book up and hold it in your two hands and not feel immense joy at just how lovely it is? It’s the perfect size. Its size alone is a delight. But luckily it is also a lovely and strange book that is both readable and mysterious, so the whole holding in your hands delight thing is just a bonus.

Now my friends, this is a bit of an unusual book. I can’t even really tell you what it’s about. It’s a woman who falls in love with an older man, an author whose picture she’s seen on the back of his book, and who she then sees in real life. It’s another woman who has just had a baby and who doesn’t know how to create her art anymore. It’s a filmmaker and her lovesick producer. It’s folly and romance and regret. It’s weird and wonderful.

It’s the past and the future, told with delicate and prodding prose. Who is telling the story? Who knows. Who needs to know? *Jazz hands* *sings* EUUUROOOPE!

 

— From Stef's Picks

"Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Oyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters’ stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous.

Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique tale that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink—her first novel to be translated into English—is a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.

Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her novel Wait, Blink was made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. 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. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She currently teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh.
Product Details ISBN: 9781250215024
ISBN-10: 1250215021
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: August 13th, 2019
Pages: 288
Language: English

Wait, Blink is a novel of teeming originality that will rewire your brain and gleefully eclipse whole libraries of lesser fiction.” —Ryan Chapman, BOMB

Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Øyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations

Wait, Blink is a thrillingly expansive novel filled with giddy riffs on everything from kung fu to the life of mussels in a seabed. Gunnhild Øyehaug is one of the most exciting writers working today.” ­—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

“I have been captivated by Gunnhild Øyehaug’s wit, imagination, ironic social commentary, and fearless embrace of any and every form of storytelling.” —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t

“[Øyehaug’s] work is playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief . . . Øyehaug is intensely interested in consciousness, and in the pictures consciousness makes; this emphasis constantly humanizes her experiments in abstraction and the fantastical.” ­—James Wood, The New Yorker