Above the earth we tell stories. Stories of hugs and bodies and souls and sex. Dewy-fresh words and old sentences, genious pieces and deceitful memories. We want to be thinking humans in a gliding story, vagabonds with free will, free feet and a free head.
Other and Better Stories by Edel Maria Landsem is a burlesque and sassy collection of short stories about everything that can happen when what’s well-behaved and normal is on collision course with the baser forces of our human nature.
A woman travels to London in affect after a breakup, and ends up shitfaced in a hotel bar, grasping for the wrong guy. Another is on a romantic weekend getaway in Paris with her husband, but sneaks outside during the night wearing only a trenchcoat while he is sleeping. A third becomes so jealous that she reveals a scandalous secret about the parentage of her friends’ child. A fourth visits her father in a nursing home, gets terrified of early dementia, takes a leave of absence from work and travels to Switzerland.
The women in these stories experience the small despairs of everyday life while dreaming of travels, self-fulfillment, excitement and belonging, all while they are feeling deep longing, spite, and the urge to break free.
Fresh debut about well-behaved women's everyday despair, spite and primordial powers
... one can rejoice in a vital, rythmical languace, rich fantasy, odd perspectives, depth and knowledge, and not least, a significant dose of liberating and totally normal madness, as several female protagonists go off the deep end.
FIVE OUT OF SIX STARS
STAVANGER AFTENBLAD
Landsem’s talent is clear, her humanist capital is large, and taking into account her mode of writing – her essayistic, novel-like fragments without an obvious plot, but with surperior linguistic authority – I think we’ll see thicker books from her pen in the future.
VÅRT LAND
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