num_pages: 128
description: From the acclaimed award-winning author of Present Tense Machine and Knots a collection of playfully surreal stories about love death and metamorphosis.In Evil Flowers a precise but madcap collection of short stories Gunnhild yehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange startling brilliance of everyday life.Across twenty-five stories yehaug renovates the form again and again confirming Lydia Davis's observation that her every story is a formal surprise smart and droll. The stories converse with contradict and expand on one another; birds hagfish and wild beasts reappear gnawing at the fringes. A section of a woman's brain slips into the toilet bowl removing her ability to remember or recognize types of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables and a new museum sinks into the ground.Inspired by Charles Baudelaire a dreamer and romantic in the era of realism yehaug revolts against the ordinary reaching instead for the wonder to be found in fantasy and absurdity. Brimming with wit ingenuity and irrepressible joy these stories mark another triumph from a dazzling international writer.
language: English
title: Evil Flowers: Stories
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux