United States
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"Stories just begin. We rarely know where and almost never why. It doesn't matter. Nothing is certain any longer. I just want to shut my eyes, point at random and say, as a sort of experiment, that once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree. That's where it may have started."
Fredrik Sjöberg continues his exploration of the pleasures and trials of those who spend their time tracing the smallest details of the natural world in these two tales of ambition, fear and hapless romance. Calling on his childhood memories and experience as a hoverfly collector, and following the trail of long forgotten entomologists before him who left their native Sweden for the national parks of the United States, Sjöberg contemplates the richness of life and the strange paths it leads us on.
Fredrik Sjöberg collects hoverflies on the island of Runmaro, in the archipelago east of Stockholm. He is also a literary critic, translator, cultural columnist and the author of several books, including The Fly Trap and The Raisin King, which form a trilogy with The Art of Flight.
"Delightful, at once informative and often humorously digressive [...] a humane man of wide-ranging curiosity, Sjoberg writes with infectious passion."
– Independent
