{"product_id":"calf","title":"Calf","description":"\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003e\u003cb\u003ePart Appalachian gothic, part science fiction, part Norwegian western, \u003ci\u003eThe Calf\u003c\/i\u003e is a darkly comic backwoods phantasmagoria that bends genres until they break in a feat of linguistic experimentation.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eIn a subterranean office labyrinth somewhere in Hadeland, Norway, a mechanical barn gnome with a metal bucket for a head spends his days shredding paper, brewing coffee, and trying to forget a certain late summer night in the woods sometime in the 1980s. That night—hazy, mythic, traumatic—centers on the Mare Cooter Canyon and a ragtag bunch of teenage boys calling themselves “the cowboys.” As the narrator’s memory crackles and sputters, we encounter grotesque archetypes: a resurrected Christ-like figure called the Dead Feller, a mysterious, moon-faced woman who may be an employment caseworker, and a strange, amorphous alien called the Calf. What happened out there, and who—or what—is telling the story? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eDrawing on the linguistic inventions of Twain and Faulkner, translator David M. Smith boldly reimagines the rural dialect of Leif Høghaug’s original, bringing it into a lush, inventive Appalachian English. The result is a voice that’s as haunted, broken, and unforgettable as its narrator. \u003ci\u003eThe Calf\u003c\/i\u003e is a howl from the margins, a cracked hymn of language under pressure—conceived and written alongside the author''s Norwegian translation of \u003ci\u003eFinnegans Wake\u003c\/i\u003e, and unmistakably charged with that book’s spirit of dream logic, doubleness, and rapturous musicality.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"MediaPlace","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57398208201086,"sku":"NW9781913744243","price":12.15,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1379\/1261\/files\/9781913744243.jpg?v=1778618080","url":"https:\/\/mediaplace.com\/products\/calf","provider":"MediaPlace","version":"1.0","type":"link"}