After the Sun — Jonas Eika

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.

Praise for After the Sun

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

â€" Claire-Louise Bennett

Eika says he 'started writing this book wanting to be surprised by it' and it delivers: this is a book that is hard to get out of your head, like an extravagant dream

â€" The Guardian

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

â€" New York Times Book Review

After the Sun confronts modernity and alienation in hypnotic prose... These stories are compelling, haunted, even radiant

â€" TLS

Eika deftly exposes the absurdity and harm of class, capitalism, and global oppressive structures through glimpses into the lives of a wide range of characters and the way they do or do not cultivate connection or community… Utterly refreshing

â€" BOMB Magazine

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

â€" Wall Street Journal

JONAS EIKA (b. 1991) is one of Denmark's most exciting writers. His debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil & Jørgen 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.