Author(s): Jonas Eika (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)

Novel | Translated fiction | Scandinavia | Lolli Editions

An urgent and electric work of fiction, After the Sun opens portals onto 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 hyper-realistic with the fantastical - he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

Under Cancun'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 globalised 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, he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.

Review: "Eika's prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it's practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read." - Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond; "Political fictions aren't supposed to be this personal. Satires aren't supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn't supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn't supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don't expect it to, and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature." - Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf; "Jonas Eika blew the doors and windows of my imagination open, and now there is a galaxy in my head and a supernova in my heart. After the Sun vibrates with the aftershock of capitalism and reality flux. Its characters confront the world we've made as if they are facing off with ex-lovers who won't leave, caught at the instant before they will either flame on or flame out. Thrilling." - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water; "Striking literary craftsmanship in an ex- perimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time- scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole." - Annie Proulx, author of Barkskins; "Jonas Eika completely destroys every safety net. After the Sun has a combustible power in its longing for another world - and it expands the term 'fiction.' No other writer has exploded onto the scene like Eika in a long while." - Der Spiegel; "Spectacular... The stories read as sensual as they are cryptic, permeated with a heavy desire that can barely be distinguished from a spiritual longing." - Der Tagesspiegel

“Eika’s prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it’s practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read.”

– Claire-Louise Bennett

“Relentlessly thrilling. The sentences in these stories stretch past the limits of the ordinary to the luridly extraordinary, and some moments feel as if they are breaking through to the sublime.”

– New York Times Book Review

“After the Sun reads a bit like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. The writing is surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion… In a translation of unsettling intensity by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, the stories derive much of their force from their insistence on transformation. Not only do the settings and characters abruptly alter, as in a dream, but the mood can instantly switch from light to dark.”

– Wall Street Journal

”If one were to combine the deadpan eeriness of Yorgos Lanthimos, the campy yet grotesque body horror of David Cronenberg, and the Dada-infused homoeroticism of William Burroughs, the end result would look something like After the Sun… The effect is bewitching.”

– Seattle Times

“Political fictions aren’t supposed to be this personal. Satires aren’t supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn’t supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn’t supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don’t expect it to and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature.”

– Marlon James

“Jonas Eika blew the doors and windows of my imagination open, and now there is a galaxy in my head and a supernova in my heart. After the Sun vibrates with the aftershock of capitalism and reality flux. Its characters confront the world we’ve made as if they are facing off with ex-lovers who won’t leave, caught at the instant before they will either flame on or flame out. Thrilling.”

– Lidia Yuknavitch

“Striking literary craftsmanship in an ex- perimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole.”

– Annie Proulx

”Whether it is young men caught up in the exploitative servility of the sun, sex and sand industry in ‘Bad Mexican Dog’, the self-intoxicating cynicism of the futures traders in ‘Alvin’, or the cosmic xenophobia of UFO enthusiasts in ‘Rachel, Nevada’, the writer is closely attuned to the ways in which only fiction can capture the strange fusion of sentimental fantasy and commercial brutality in our contemporary moment.”

– The Irish Times

”Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader’s nervous system. Difficult and mesmerizing, the stories range from formally formidable to downright mind-melting in their creative disregard for convention.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“Eika holds nothing back in his fiction, he goes into the tightest of spaces and most intimate and terrifying of moments in order to break through to places few have been before – or even imagined existing.”

–Refinery29

“Studded with shockingly visceral images, 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.”

– Publishers Weekly

“After the Sun has surprised and enthralled the jury with its global perspective, its sensual and imaginative language, and its ability to speak about contemporary political challenges without the reader feeling in any way directed to a certain place… There is a real sense of poetic magic. Reality opens into other possibilities; other dimensions. There is something wonderful and hopeful in it that reminds us how literature can do more than just mirror what we already know.”

– The Jury of the Nordic Council Literature Prize

“In Sherilyn Hellberg’s translation, these stories are by turns lyrical and brutal, ultra-realistic and fantastical. They penetrate layers of life and experience in rhythms that are both full of music and full of horror, showing the reader an underside to our modern, globalised world.”

– Lunate

Prizes: Winner of The Nordic Council Literature Prize 2019 and The Michael Strunge Prize 2019 and The Montana Prize for Fiction 2019 and The Blixen Literary Award 2019.

Author Biography: JONAS EIKA (b. 1991) is one of Denmark's most exciting writers. His debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil & Jorgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging Danish writers in 2016. After the Sun was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2019, as well as the Michael Strunge Prize, the Montana Prize for Fiction, and the Blixen Literary Award. SHERILYN NICOLETTE HELLBERG has published translations of Johanne Bille, Tove Ditlevsen, and Ida Marie Hede. In 2018, she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her translation of Caspar Eric's Nike.