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The Calf
Paperback
WesternsGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $16.95
ISBN13: 9781913744243
Publisher: Fum d'Estampa
Published: Nov 11 2025
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
Part Appalachian gothic, part science fiction, part Norwegian western, The Calf is a darkly comic backwoods phantasmagoria that bends genres until they break in a feat of linguistic experimentation.
In 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?
Drawing on the linguistic inventions of Twain and Faulkner, translator David M. Smith boldly reimagines the rural dialect of Leif H ghaug'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. The Calf is a howl from the margins, a cracked hymn of language under pressure--conceived and written alongside the author's Norwegian translation of Finnegans Wake, and unmistakably charged with that book's spirit of dream logic, doubleness, and rapturous musicality.
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