SG Fiction: A Sudden Liberating Thought

A story by Kjell Askildsen

Welcome to SG Fiction, our new newsletter featuring an original piece of fiction from a different author around the world. It’s part of our set of expanded offerings. At least once a month, you’ll receive an original short story from a different part of the world, introduced by a member of our fiction advisory board. Today’s selection is by Kjell Askildsen presented by Stranger’s Guide Editor in Chief, Kira Brunner Don.

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Everything we publish at Stranger’s Guide is centered around place. But fiction offers new dimensions for exploring a location, allowing an author to create feelings and meanings that transmit those elements and seem most essential yet ineffable.

Today we present a piece from our Scandinavian guide by the Norwegian author Kjell Askildsen. Faithful to that part of the world, the story is understated and formal, dwelling on the simplicity of loneliness. But, in true Scandinavian style, it takes a bizarre and uncanny noir-like turn. 

Askildsen, who died in 2021, is heralded as one of the greatest Norwegian writers of the twentieth century. His stories are stripped down and free of excessive descriptions but full of tension and understated drama. This piece, “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” is a perfect example of these skills: a deceptively simple and exquisite short story.

—Kira Brunner Don

Whitechapel, London. 1972. Photograph by Ian Berry.

A Sudden Liberating Thought

By Kjell Askildsen, Translated by Seán Kinsella