Download or read book Iceland s Bell written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering under extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes a bawdy joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king’s hangman. In the years that follow, the hapless but resilient rogue Hreggvidsson becomes a pawn entangled in political and personal conflicts playing out on a far grander scale. Chief among these is the star-crossed love affair between Snaefridur, known as “Iceland’s Sun,” a beautiful, headstrong young noblewoman, and Arnas Arnaeus, the king’s antiquarian, an aristocrat whose worldly manner conceals a fierce devotion to his downtrodden countrymen. As their personal struggle plays itself out on an international stage, Laxness creates a Dickensian canvas of heroism and venality, violence and tragedy, charged with narrative enchantment on every page. Sometimes grim, sometimes uproarious, and always captivating, Iceland's Ball is at once an updating of the traditional Icelandic saga and a caustic social satire.
Download or read book ICELANDS BELL written by Halldór Laxness and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book World Light written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificently humane novel from the acclaimed Icelandic Nobel Prize winner: as an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness. As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this extraordinary novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf’s ambition drives him onward—and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women—World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.
Download or read book Denmark and the New North Atlantic written by Kirsten Thisted and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how the emergence of the Arctic as a new geopolitical arena affects and reshapes the area known as the North Atlantic: Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and coastal Norway. The relationship between the center of the former Danish empire and its subordinates have rested on (varying degrees of) asymmetric power relations, that are intertwined with political as well as emotional bonds. With climate change a whole new reality is emerging in the Arctic and sub-Arctic areas. Power is moving north, and new connections and partnerships are being developed. As the North Atlantic countries share a history as being part of a Danish empire, some of the hierarchies and mindsets inherited from the past still affect the present. This calls for an in-depth understanding of the cultural history of the North Atlantic as well as current relations. What narratives make up the foundation for contemporary cooperation? How are historical relations and narratives being reinterpreted today? How do postcolonial relations affect decision-making concerning natural resources? How do North Atlantic communities envision the future? A team of historians, literary theorists, art historians, ethno - graphers and culture and communication scholars with profound insight into the histories, languages and cultures of the North Atlantic have collaborated on this study of the North Atlantic countries as an emerging new center in the North. Foundations that made this publication possible: Carlsberg Foundation
Download or read book Miss Iceland written by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Will appeal to readers of Elena Ferrante and Margaret Atwood . . . the unusual setting offers an interesting twist on the portrait of an artist as a young woman.” —Bookpage In 1960s Iceland, Hekla dreams of being a writer. In a nation of poets, where each household proudly displays leatherbound volumes of the Sagas, and there are more writers per capita than anywhere else in the world, there is only one problem: she is a woman. After packing her few belongings, including James Joyces’s Ulysses and a Remington typewriter, Hekla heads for Reykjavik with a manuscript buried in her bags. She moves in with her friend Jon, a gay man who longs to work in the theatre, but can only find dangerous, backbreaking work on fishing trawlers. Hekla’s opportunities are equally limited: marriage and babies, or her job as a waitress, in which harassment from customers is part of the daily grind. The two friends feel completely out of place in a small and conservative world. And yet that world is changing: JFK is shot. Hemlines are rising. In Iceland, another volcano erupts and Hekla meets a poet who brings to light harsh realities about her art—as she realizes she must escape to find freedom abroad, whatever the cost. Miss Iceland, a winner of two international book awards, comes from the acclaimed author of Hotel Silence, which received the Icelandic Literary Prize. “Only a great book can make you feel you’re really there, a thousand miles and a generation away. I loved it.” —Kit de Waal, author of My Name is Leon “[A] winning tale of friendship and self-fulfillment.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download or read book Paradise Reclaimed written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize winner comes a captivating novel about an idealistic Icelandic farmer who journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise. • "Full of an earthy poetry...a style wonderfully wise and entirely Scandinavian in its combination of magic and reality." —The New York Times Book Review • With an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children. But when he impulsively offers his children's beloved pure-white pony to the visiting King of Denmark, he sets in motion a chain of disastrous events that leaves his family in ruins and himself at the other end of the earth, optimistically building a home for them among the devout polygamists in the Promised Land of Utah. By the time the broken family is reunited, Laxness has spun his trademark blend of compassion and comically brutal satire into a moving and spellbinding enchantment, composed equally of elements of fable and folkore and of the most humble truths.
Download or read book Alexander Graham Bell written by Edwin S. Grosvenor and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ". . . rarely have inventor and invention been better served than in this book." – New York Times Book Review Here, Edwin Grosvenor, American Heritage's publisher and Bell's great-grandson, tells the dramatic story of the race to invent the telephone and how Bell's patent for it would become the most valuable ever issued. He also writes of Bell's other extraordinary inventions: the first transmission of sound over light waves, metal detector, first practical phonograph, and early airplanes, including the first to fly in Canada. And he examines Bell's humanitarian efforts, including support for women's suffrage, civil rights, and speeches about what he warned would be a "greenhouse effect" of pollution causing global warming.
Download or read book Under the Glacier written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress. What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.
Download or read book The Great Weaver From Kashmir written by Halldor Laxness and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness “Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the ‘sagas' shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.” — The Guardian “Finally, finally, an imposing work of fiction, which rises like a cliff from the flatness of Icelandic poetry and fiction of recent years!” —Kristján Albertsson, Vaka 1927 The Great Weaver from Kashmir is Laxness’ first major novel, the book that propelled Icelandic literature into the modern world. Shortly after World War One, Steinn Elliði, a young philosopher-poet dandy, leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland’s shores for mainland Europe, seeking to become “the most perfect man on earth.” His journey leads us through a wide range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, from hedonism to socialism to aestheticism to Benedictine monasticism. Upon his return to Iceland, Steinn finds himself more conflicted than before, torn between love of the beauty and traditions of his homeland, longing and regret for his great adolescent love, Diljá, and his newfound monastic ideal, forcing him to make choices with fateful consequences. Published when Laxness was only twenty-five years old, The Great Weaver from Kashmir’s radical experimentation caused a stir in Iceland, which would soon reverberate throughout Europe. The Great Weaver is much more than a first major work by a literary master—it is a groundbreaking modernist classic.
Download or read book Independent People written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1997-01-14 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author, a magnificent, epic novel—"funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant" (Annie Proulx)—at last available to contemporary American readers. Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
Download or read book Face of the Bell Witch written by Jerry Gundersheimer and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: action-packed, relentlessly paced plot much to like about Face of the Bell Witch strong start to what could be an extraordinarily entertaining series. BlueInk Review a major cliffhanger unique perspective of what life might be like if death werent the end of relationships. Clarion Review (four stars) alternately tender and savage first installment of a paranormal series prose is frequently clever thick plot threads brightened by local color but tinged with shocking violence. Kirkus Review Deep within the bowels of a Tennessee cave, the vindictive spirit of the Bell Witch awaits the catalyst to unleash her vengeance again after a decade of dormancy Ten-year-old Abby Whitaker is troubled. Her devoted father, Brody, a gifted Clarksville medium, is aware that she is beginning to pick up on subtle signs presented by spirits of her late relatives. But who is the stranger loitering across from Abbys school, seeking her attention and worrying her so? While Brody juggles Abbys angsts along with the myriad demands of fatherhood and personal financial struggles, he fatefully crosses paths with two dangerous small-time hoodlums, leaving him to wonder if his unique ability is a blessing or a curse. As the slumbering Bell Witch is roused once more, Brody is propelled into a desperate life-or-death maelstrom where he is pitted against sinister forces that will stop at nothing to get what they want: the one he holds closest to his heart. In this paranormal thriller, a gifted medium and his young daughter unwittingly become embroiled in a perilous clash with both criminal and supernatural worldsawakening a vengeful spirit in the process.
Download or read book The Fish Can Sing written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-02-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most beloved novels from the Nobel Prize winner—"a beacon in twentieth-century literature" (Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-winning author of Dear Life). A poignant coming-of-age tale marked with the peculiar Icelandic blend of light irony and dark humor. • With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. The orphan Alfgrimur has spent an idyllic childhood sheltered in the simple turf cottage of a generous and eccentric elderly couple. Alfgrimur dreams only of becoming a fisherman like his adoptive grandfather, until he meets Iceland's biggest celebrity. The opera singer Gardar Holm’s international fame is a source of tremendous pride to tiny, insecure Iceland, though no one there has ever heard him sing. A mysterious man who mostly avoids his homeland and repeatedly fails to perform for his adoring countrymen, Gardar takes a particular interest in Alfgrimur’s budding musical talent and urges him to seek out the world beyond the one he knows and loves. But as Alfgrimur discovers that Gardar is not what he seems, he begins to confront the challenge of finding his own path without turning his back on where he came from.
Download or read book Scandinavian Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Army of She written by Evelyn McDonnell and published by AtRandom. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wearing thick glasses, speaking in her thick Icelandic accent, and, well, seeming a touch thick, Bjork stormed the public consciousness in 2000 as an unlikely heroine in the experimental musical film Dancer In the Dark. Army of She is an in-depth look at the woman who first took the public stage twenty-three years ago, analyzing her rise from child prodigy to punk anarchist to New Wave novelty (as member of the Sugarcubes) to hit soloist to film star.
Download or read book Scandinavica written by Elias Bredsdorff and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Journalism After Snowden written by Emily Bell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward Snowden's release of classified NSA documents exposed the widespread government practice of mass surveillance in a democratic society. The publication of these documents, facilitated by three journalists, as well as efforts to criminalize the act of being a whistleblower or source, signaled a new era in the coverage of national security reporting. The contributors to Journalism After Snowden analyze the implications of the Snowden affair for journalism and the future role of the profession as a watchdog for the public good. Integrating discussions of media, law, surveillance, technology, and national security, the book offers a timely and much-needed assessment of the promises and perils for journalism in the digital age. Journalism After Snowden is essential reading for citizens, journalists, and academics in search of perspective on the need for and threats to investigative journalism in an age of heightened surveillance. The book features contributions from key players involved in the reporting of leaks of classified information by Edward Snowden, including Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian; ex-New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson; legal scholar and journalist Glenn Greenwald; and Snowden himself. Other contributors include dean of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Steve Coll, Internet and society scholar Clay Shirky, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and journalist Julia Angwin. Topics discussed include protecting sources, digital security practices, the legal rights of journalists, access to classified data, interpreting journalistic privilege in the digital age, and understanding the impact of the Internet and telecommunications policy on journalism. The anthology's interdisciplinary nature provides a comprehensive overview and understanding of how society can protect the press and ensure the free flow of information.
Download or read book Scotland Denmark Iceland Norway and Sweden written by and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
