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 The Origins of Paradise Reclaimed written by Halldór Laxness and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradise Reclaimed written by Halldór Laxness and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradise Regained written by Greg Matloff and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-07-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was our planet like before the advent of our modern civilization? What effects has our civilization had on the planet and its ecological systems? Paradise Regained discusses these questions and then creates a scenario for the re-greening of Earth. The authors introduce new and innovative ideas on how humankind might use the resources of the solar system for terrestrial benefit. Earth would then become a place for a technologically advanced human civilization to live in synchronization, if not in harmony, with the environment which gave us birth. Since the formation of our solar system, the resources and ecological state of Earth have undergone many changes. The environmental challenges facing humanity today, as the authors posit them, will not be resolved simply by conservation and Earth-based alternative technologies. Paradise Regained considers the environmental dilemma and highlights the risk of humankind's future extinction from environmental degradation. Human population growth, climate change, and the strained sustainability of the few remaining habitats for wild life are all discussed. The authors, however, are not discouraged and offer a potential solution through the development of space. Not only will extraterrestrial resources help avert environmental disaster, but will also provide the basis for continued technological and societal progress. The resources of the solar system will help meet our projected industrial needs and feed our industry once terrestrial sources are depleted. Space-based power generation systems will work synergistically with Earth-based conservation. Paradise Regained concludes with the discussion on how closed ecological systems in space will help us to build a prosperous and sustainable future for all humanity.

Download or read book Paradise Discourse Imperialism and Globalization written by Sharae Deckard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Deckard analyzes authors such as Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Woolf, Juan Rulfo, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera to make a materialist study of the relation between paradise myths and the ideologies and economies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in literature from Mexico, Zanzibar and Sri Lanka.

Download or read book Independent People written by Halldor Laxness and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself 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 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 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 The Feminine Reclaimed written by Stevie Davies and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-11-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Feminine Reclaimed breaks new ground in the field of Renaissance scholarship. Stevie Davies considers the feminine principle as it was developed through the humanist and Neoplatonic revival of ancient classical learning and from this perspective approaches the major works of the three great literary figures of the English Renaissance—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Through close, perceptive readings of their most crucial works, informed by a familiarity with the whole range of their context in the European literature and thought of their time, Stevie Davies is able to demonstrate the great importance of the feminine principle in the consciousness of these writers and their age, a time of political, religious, and social upheaval in which perceptions of woman and her status in society underwent momentous changes. She analyzes guiding symbols, mythical allusions, and literary structures in major works by the three poets to show that this rediscovered image of the feminine was incorporated into The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's last plays, and Paradise Lost in such a manner as to create an alternative system of values which either redefined or criticized the patriarchal structures of the contemporary world.

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 Couples written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal. Praise for Couples “Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review “Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Paradise Reclaimed Translated by Magnus Magnusson written by Halldór Laxness and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 A Monastery for the Ibex written by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gran Paradiso National Park is Italy’s oldest, and was instrumental in preventing the extinction of the Alpine ibex between World War I and just after World War II. Today, there are more than 30,000 ibex living in the Alps, all of which descended from that last colony protected in Gran Paradiso under Mussolini’s rule. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg merges the history of conservation with the area’s social history and Italy’s larger political history to produce a multifaceted narrative about the park as an institution, the conflicts it triggered, and practices adopted to manage the ibex despite hurdles placed by the fascist regime. The book’s central argument is that, in fascist Italy, preservation—propaganda notwithstanding—was a product of the regime’s continuities with the previous liberal system. Italy’s total fascist transformation, accomplished only more than a decade after Mussolini took power, virtually unmade the early successes of preservation set in place by the nascent “nature state” in the regime’s early years. Despite this conflict, conservationists succeeded in preserving the ibex. Hardenberg positions this success within the broader history of science, conservation, and tourism in fascist Italy and the Alpine region, creating a comprehensive historical background and comparative reference to ongoing debates about the role of nature conservation in general and in relation to the state and its agencies.

Download or read book Shaping the Future written by Trausti Valsson and published by How the World will Change. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an auto-biography of Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic architect, planner, theoretician and a professor of planning at the University of Iceland. It gives a personal account of what shaped planning and design in the world and in Iceland as he experienced it in his lifetime. Valsson e.g. tells about his personal encounter with Ian McHarg, Buckminster Fuller and Christopher Alexander. Early TV started working on a future plan for Iceland, consisting, for example, of roads connecting Iceland´s settlements, across the Central Highlands. He also started an overlay mapping project, mapping both the hazard- and resource areas of the country, which created a basis for his Iceland-Plan proposals. Work on this he continued at Berkeley and at the University of Iceland as he started teaching there in 1988. Many of his articles and books deal with this subject. In 1980 Valsson started his PhD studies in Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, California. In the philosophical section of his dissertation he presented his argument that the Western, mechanistic worldview was the underlying cause for today´s alienation, and that more holistic and integrative schemes were inherent in Eastern worldviews. TV´s dissertation is called A Theory of Integration for Design and Planning – Based on the Concept of Complementarity (1987). In 1988 – a year after Valsson returned to Iceland – he got an associate professor position in planning at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Iceland, and later a tenured professor position. The last part of this book describes Valsson’s 27 years at the University. The title of this present book: Shaping the Future – Ideas – Planning – Design, reflects how wide Valsson´s field of his operation has been.

Download or read book The Islander written by Halldor Gudmundsson and published by MacLehose Press. This book was released on 2023-09-28 with total page 758 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An enthralling, heartening study of a man of unflagging interest in life" Independent "A thoroughly researched biography" New York Review of Books "Provides readers of English with a perfect introduction to the life and works of an outstanding writer, one whom everyone should read" Irish Times "I am thoroughly convinced by Gudmundsson's portrayal of Laxness" J. M COETZEE A strong and memorable portrayal of a man who fought heroically to write for the world, but in one of its rarest languages. Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. During his life, which spanned nearly the entire century, he not only wrote sixty books, but also became an active participant in Europe's idealistic debates and struggles. In the 1930s, Laxness became attracted to Soviet communism. He travelled widely in the Soviet Bloc and, despite witnessing some atrocities, remained a defender of communism until the 1960s. But his political leanings never dominated his work. Laxness continually sought to divulge the world of beauty that lurks beneath the everyday, ensuring his artistry remained a sanctuary of humanism and reflection. In this biography, Guðmundsson has been granted access to unique material by Laxness' family. As a result, the interrelationships between Laxness' personal life, his politics and his career are meticulously examined. What emerges is a grand description of a fascinating personality in which the manifold conflicts of the 20th century are mirrored. "Laxness is a writer of the first degree, a writer I dreamed of coming close to" BORIS PASTERNAK, 1960 "When in a bad mood I have picked one of your books. And there the pure and deep sound has welcomed me, strong and charming from the first page" KAREN BLIXEN in an open letter to Laxness in 1952 Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton