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Translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
Winner of of the 2023 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction
Winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2019
Winner of the Michael Strunge Prize
Winner of the Montana Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Blixen Literary Award
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022
From a major new international voice, mesmerising, 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 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.
Publication 24 August 2021
Description 198 × 129 mm, 158 pages, Softcover Original
ISBN 978-1-9999928-5-9
Design Kasper Vang
Read ‘Alvin’ from After the Sun in The New Yorker
Read ‘Me, Rory and Aurora’ in Granta
Jonas Eika on Hope and Defiance: An interview by Cressida Leyshon in The New Yorker
JONAS EIKA (b. 1991) is one of Denmark’s most exciting writers. Their debut novel, Marie House Warehouse, was awarded the Bodil & Jørgen Munch-Christensen Prize for emerging Danish writers in 2016. In 2023, After the Sun was awarded the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction, adding to its long list of accolades that also includes winning the Nordic Council Literature Prize and a nomination for the International Booker Prize. Eika lives in Copenhagen.
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.
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Praise for After the Sun
Howdoes it feel to be anative of the digital era? What effect does late capitalism have uponour intimate lives?A lot of people instinctively sense that time and space feel different these days, but few people seem able to capture that feeling in prose. Jonas Eika manages it. After the Sun is an inventive and exciting book – a true original
– Zadie Smith
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
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
– 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
– New York Times Book Review
After the Sun confronts modernity and alienation in hypnotic prose... These stories are compelling, haunted, even radiant
– 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
– 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
– 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