Download or read book tr sarv kingar written by Alaric Hall and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2020 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global banking boom of the early twenty-first century expanded towards implosion, Icelandic media began calling the country's celebrity financiers útrásarvíkingar: “raiding vikings.” This new coinage encapsulated the macho, medievalist nationalism which underwrote Iceland's exponential financialisation. Yet within a few days in October 2008, Iceland saw all its main banks collapse beneath debts worth nearly ten times the country's GDP.Hall charts how Icelandic novelists and poets grappled with the Crash over the ensuing decade. As the first English-language monograph devoted to twenty-first-century Icelandic literature, it provides Anglophone readers with an introduction to one of the world's liveliest literary scenes. It also contributes a key case study for understanding global artistic responses to the early twenty-first century crisis of runaway, unregulated capitalism, exploring the struggles of writers to adapt realist forms of art to surreal times.As Iceland's biggest crisis since their independence from Denmark in 1944, the effect of the Crash on the national self-image was as seismic as its effects on the economy. This study analyses the centrality of whiteness and the abjection of the “developing world” in Iceland's post-colonial identity, and shows how Crash-writing explores the collisions of Iceland's traditional, nationalist medievalism with a dystopian, Orientalist medievalism associated with the Islamic world.The Crash in Iceland was instantly recognised as offering important economic insights. This book shows how Iceland also helps us to understand the cultural convulsions that have followed the Financial Crisis widely in the West.
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 Old Icelandic Literature and Society written by Margaret Clunies Ross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of Old Icelandic literature set within its social and cultural context.
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 Iceland written by Marcel Krueger and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to Iceland's rich literary heritage - from Norse witches to contemporary crime fiction. Iceland is an island of multiple identities in constant flux, just like its unruly, volcanic ground. Shaped as much by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Iceland's literary heritage is one of Europe's richest – and most ancient. Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers takes the literary-minded traveller (either in person or in an armchair) on a vivid and illuminating journey. It follows Iceland's many stories that have been passed down through the generations: told and retold by sheep farmers, psalm-writers, travelling reverends, independence fighters, scholars and hedonists. From the captivating Norse myths, which continue to inspire contemporary authors such as A. S. Byatt, to gripping Scandinavian crime fiction and Game of Thrones, via Jules Verne and J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney, Iceland's influence has spread far beyond its frozen shores. Peopled by Norse maidens and witches, elves and outlaws, and taking the reader and traveller from Reykjavik and the Bay of Smokes to the remote Westfjords and desolate highlands, this is an enthralling portrait of the Land of Ice and Fire.
Download or read book The History of Iceland written by Gunnar Karlsson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iceland is unique among European societies in having been founded as late as the Viking Age and in having copious written and archaeological sources about its origin. Gunnar Karlsson, that country's premier historian, chronicles the age of the Sagas, consulting them to describe an era without a monarch or central authority. Equating this prosperous time with the golden age of antiquity in world history, Karlsson then marks a correspondence between the Dark Ages of Europe and Iceland's "dreary period", which started with the loss of political independence in the late thirteenth century and culminated with an epoch of poverty and humility, especially during the early Modern Age. Iceland's renaissance came about with the successful struggle for independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with the industrial and technical modernization of the first half of the twentieth century. Karlsson describes the rise of nationalism as Iceland's mostly poor peasants set about breaking with Denmark, and he shows how Iceland in the twentieth century slowly caught up economically with its European neighbors.
Download or read book A History of Icelandic Literature written by Stefán Einarsson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1957. Stefán Einarsson covers almost a thousand years of Icelandic literature in tracing the influence of the sagas and eddic poems. The book begins with background on Icelandic literature, outlining its literary roots in Scandinavia. Following this, Einarsson provides a thorough survey of Icelandic literature through the 1950s.
Download or read book A Companion to Old Norse Icelandic Literature and Culture written by Rory McTurk and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-03-11 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major survey of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culturedemonstrates the remarkable continuity of Icelandic language andculture from medieval to modern times. Comprises 29 chapters written by leading scholars in thefield Reflects current debates among Old Norse-Icelandicscholars Pays attention to previously neglected areas of study, such asthe sagas of Icelandic bishops and the fantasy sagas Looks at the ways Old Norse-Icelandic literature is used bymodern writers, artists and film directors, both within and outsideScandinavia Sets Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature in its widercultural context
Download or read book A History of Icelandic Literature written by Daisy L. Neijmann and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As complete a history as possible of the literature of Iceland.
Download or read book Bard of Iceland written by Dick Ringler and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bard of Iceland makes available for the first time in any language other than Icelandic an extensive selection of works by Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-1845), the most important poet of modern Iceland. Jónas was also Iceland's first professionally trained geologist and an active contributor in a number of other scientific fields: geography, botany, zoology, and archaeology. He played a key role as well in Iceland's struggle to gain independence from Denmark. "Descriptive power and fullness of spirit were the hallmarks of his soul," wrote a contemporary admirer. Dick Ringler, one of the premier scholars of Icelandic literature in the world, offers a substantial biography of Jónas, a representative selection of his most important poems, and some of his prose work in science and belles lettres. Ringler also provides extended commentaries and an essay on Icelandic prosody. The poems are translated into English equivalents of their original complex meters in Icelandic and Danish. As a poet Jónas was intimately familiar with his nation's medieval literary inheritance--the sagas and eddas--and also with the groundbreaking work of contemporary German and Danish Romanticism (Chamisso, Heine, Oehlenschläger). A master of poetic form, Jónas not only exploited and enlarged the possibilities of traditional eddic and skaldic meters, but introduced the sonnet, triolet stanza, terza and ottava rima, and blank verse into the Icelandic metrical repertory.
Download or read book Butterfly in the Typewriter written by Cory MacLauchlin and published by Da Capo Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited biography of John Kennedy Toole ("A Confederacy of Dunces"), whose fascinating life and tragic death is one of the most amazing publishingstories in American literature.
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 The Book of Reykjavik written by Friðgeir Einarsson and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reluctant to observe a new family tradition, a boy finds himself stranded outside a graveyard on the night before Christmas... Three farming brothers, forced to relocate to the city by poor harvests, discover an unexpected demand for their green-fingered talents... Residents of a new apartment block are woken in the early hours by the eerie sound of a table saw that once operated on the building’s grounds... Iceland is a land of stories; from the epic sagas of its mythic past, to its claim today of being home to more writers, more published books and more avid readers, per head, than anywhere in the world. As its capital (and indeed only city), Reykjavik has long been an inspiration for these stories. But, as this collection demonstrates, this fishing-village-turned-metropolis at the farthest fringe of Europe has been both revered and reviled by Icelanders over the years. The tension between the city and the surrounding countryside, its rural past and urban present, weaves its way through The Book of Reykjavik, forming an outline of a fragmented city marked by both contradiction and creativity. Includes a foreword written by award-winning Icelandic author Sjón. Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Philip Roughton, Lytton Smith, Meg Matich and Larissa Kyzer. Published with the support of the Icelandic Literature Center.
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 Hotel Silence written by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] novel of mid-life redemption . . . Ólafsdóttir writes about a good man in crisis with a raw beauty, as he gradually awakens to life and love.” —Financial Times Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, Hotel Silence is a delightful and heartwarming new novel from Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, a writer who “upends expectations” (The New York Times). Jónas Ebeneser is a handy DIY kind of man with a compulsion to fix things, but he can’t seem to fix his own life. On the cusp of turning fifty, divorced, adrift, he’s recently discovered he is not the biological father of his daughter, Gudrun Waterlily, and he has sunk into an existential crisis, losing all will to live. As he visits his senile mother in a nursing home, he secretly muses on how, when, and where to put himself out of his misery. To prevent his only daughter from discovering his body, Jónas decides it’s best to die abroad. Armed with little more than his toolbox and a change of clothes, he flies to an unnamed country where the fumes of war still hover in the air. He books a room at the sparsely occupied Hotel Silence, in a small town riddled with landmines and the aftershocks of violence, and there he comes to understand the depths of other people’s scars while beginning to see his wounds in a new light. A celebration of life’s infinite possibilities, of transformations and second chances, Hotel Silence is a rousing story of a man, a community, and a path toward regeneration from the depths of despair.
Download or read book Land of Love and Ruins written by Oddný Eir and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oddný Eir is an authentic author, philosopher and mystic. She weaves together diaries and fiction. She is the writer I feel can best express the female psyche of now and has bridged the gap between rural Iceland and Western philosophy. A true pioneer!!!!!!!!” —Björk The winner of the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize in 2012, Land of Love and Ruins is the debut novel by a daring new voice in international fiction: Oddný Eir. Written in the form of a diary but with fantastical linguistic verve, the narrator sets out on a universal quest: to find a place to belong—and a way of being in the world. Paradoxically, her longing to settle down drives her to embark on all kinds of journeys, physical and mental, through time and space, in order to find answers to questions that concern not only her personally, but also the whole of humankind. She explores various modes of living, ponders different types of relationships and contemplates her bond with her family, land and nation; trying to find a balance between companionship and independence, movement and stability, past, present, and future. An enchanting blend of autobiography, diary, philosophical inquiry, and fantasy, Land of Love and Ruins is a richly imagined and utterly unique book about being human in the modern world.
Download or read book Iceland written by James Krusoe and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul falls in love with Emily, a worker at the Institute, when he goes to pick out a new organ. The memory of their interlude stays with Paul through the rest of his life.
