Names for the Sea : Strangers in Iceland

Gunnar Karlsson

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. Lire plus…

Robert Kellogg (Introduction), Jane Smiley (Preface)

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's great literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom. Lire plus…

Halldór Laxness

First published in 1946, this humane epic novel is set in rural Iceland in the early twentieth century. Bjartus is a sheep farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land. Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family will come between him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart. As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus' obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever. Lire plus…

Hannah Kent

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. "A magical exercise in artful literary fiction... With language flickering, sparkling and flashing like the northern lights... Beautiful are Kent's descriptions of the interminable summer light, the ever-present snow and ice and cold of winter's gloomy darkness, the mountains, sea and valleys where sustenance is blood-rung from sheep." - Kirkus ReviewsRiveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others? Lire plus…

Sarah Moss

The study of food in literature complicates established critical positions. Both a libidinal pleasure and the ultimate commodity, food in fiction can represent sex as well as money and brings the body and the marketplace together in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unsettling. Spilling __the Beans__ explores these relations in the context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century women’s fiction, where concerns about bodily, economic and intellectual productivity and consumption power decades of novels, conduct books and popular medicine. The introduction suggests ways in which attention to food in these texts might complicate recent developments in literary theory and criticism, while the body of the book is devoted to close readings of novels and children’s stories by Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Ferrier. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, women’s studies and material culture. Lire plus…

Moss, Sarah

This book argues that credences can be knowledge. Say you have . credence that a certain coin landed heads, . credence that your friend Jones smokes, and . credence that your friend Brown smokes. I argue that each of these credences can be knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can be knowledge. Traditional epistemology has focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs in propositions, such as the proposition that you are not dreaming, or that God exists, or that you have hands. But in addition to having knowledge of black and white propositions, we have knowledge that comes in every shade of grey. This book is about credences, but not just about credences. More generally, it is about probabilistic beliefs. For instance, I argue that you can know that it might be raining outside,where this epistemicmodal belief cannot be reduced to full belief in any proposition. Similarly, your conditional beliefs and conditional credences can be probabilistic knowledge.Also, this book is about knowledge, but not just about knowledge—it is alsoabout belief andassertion.There is something common to credences, epistemic modal beliefs, conditional beliefs, conditional credences, and so on. The contents of these attitudes are sets of probability spaces over propositions, or probabilistic contents. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, I hold that you can believe and assert probabilistic contents.Hence probabilistic contents play a central role... Lire plus…

Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain, Alexis Averbuck

__#1 best-selling guide to__ __Iceland__ __\*__ **Lonely Planet Iceland** is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Splash around in the Blue Lagoon's geothermal water, catch a glimpse of the celestial Northern Lights, or take a boat trip among the icebergs; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Iceland and begin your journey now! **Inside Lonely Planet's Iceland Travel Guide:** * **Colour** maps and images throughout * **Highlights** **and itineraries** help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests * **Insider tips** to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots * **Essential info** **at your fingertips** - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices * **Honest reviews for all budgets** - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss * **Cultural insights** give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - history, politics, landscapes, wildlife, literature, music, cinema, art, architecture, customs, cuisine. * **Free, convenient pull-out** **Reykjavik map** (included in print version), plus over 37 maps * **Covers** Reykjavik, the Westfjords, the Highlands, North Iceland, East Iceland, South Iceland, the Golden Circle, Southwest Iceland, the Eastfjords, Akureyri, Hunafloi and more **The Perfect Choice:** **Lonely Planet Iceland,** our most... Lire plus…

Leila Slimani, Sam Taylor (Translation)

Also known as The Perfect NannyThe baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she & her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite & devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris's upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint & is able to host enviable birthday parties.The couple & nanny become more dependent on each other. But as jealousy, resentment & suspicions increase, Myriam & Paul's idyllic tableau is shattered...°°° Leïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. A journalist & frequent commentator on women’s & human rights, she is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language & culture. Leïla is also the chair of the International Booker Prize 2023 judging panel. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she lives in Portugal. Lire plus…

Sarah Moss, Sarah Moss, Sarah Moss

In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age. For two weeks, the length of her father's vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan; they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit. The students are fulfilling their coursework; Silvie's father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs--particularly their sacrifices to the bog. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past. What comes next but human sacrifice? A story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the "primitive minds" of our ancestors. Lire plus…

Leïla Slimani; Éditions Les Arènes

**La vie sexuelle au Maroc.**__Sexe et mensonges__, c’est la parole, forte et sincère, d’une jeunesse marocaine bâillonnée dans un monde arabe où le sexe se consomme pourtant comme une marchandise.Les femmes que Leïla Slimani a rencontrées lui ont confié sans fard ni tabou leur vie sexuelle, entre soumission et transgression. Car, au Maroc, la loi punit et proscrit toute forme de relations sexuelles hors mariage, tout comme l’homosexualité et la prostitution.Dans cette société fondée sur l’hypocrisie, la jeune fille et la femme n’ont qu’une alternative : vierge ou épouse.__Sexe et mensonges__est une confrontation essentielle avec les démons intimes du Maroc et un appel vibrant à la liberté universelle d’être, d’aimer et de désirer. Lire plus…

Laxness, Halldor

The Great Weaver from Kashmir is Nobel Prize winner Halldór 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 huge range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, from hedonism to socialism to aestheticism to Benedictine monasticism, exploring, as Laxness puts it, "the far-ranging variety in the life of a soul, with the swings on a pendulum oscillating between angel and devil." 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. The Great Weaver from Kashmir is as much a domestic parlor drama as it is a novel of ideas; it can be seen as the downward spiral of an antihero or an exploration of idealism and loss; it is at once an inward-looking and daring early novel and a modern epic spun by a superior craftsman. Published when Laxness was only twenty-five years old, The Great Weaver from Kashmir’s radical experimentation created a stir in Iceland. Appearing in English now for the first time, The Great Weaver is much more than a first... Lire plus…

Laxness, Halldor

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 magnificently humane 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. Lire plus…

Laxness, Halldor

An idealistic Icelandic farmer journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise in this captivating novel by Nobel Prize—winner Halldor Laxness. 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. Lire plus…

Sigmundsdottir, Alda

lgli/eng\2016-09\2016-09-02\Alda Sigmundsdottir - The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days (mobi).mobi Lire plus…

Sigmundsdóttir, Alda

'The Icelandic nation has a long and rich history of storytelling. Throughout centuries characterized by hardship, poverty, and dark winters, the Icelanders kept their spirits high and moral values intact by telling each other stories. In this collection of 15 Icelandic folk legends, we get a glimpse of the worldview of the Icelanders in centuries past as they endeavored to understand and cope with the natural phenomena around them. There are stories of malicious ghosts, outlaws living in carved-out boulders, hidden people residing in grassy knolls, trolls that are tripped up by their own stupidity, and much more. In addition, there is one story exemplifying a fairy tale motif that scholars have discovered to be unique to Iceland: that of the good stepmother (The Story of Himinbjörg). Throughout we get a powerful sense of the Icelanders’ beliefs, values, and fears, as well as their strong need to cling to all that was pure and good.While this is the first time the book appears in electronic form, 12 of the stories were previously published in physical form on two separate occasions. The book has been out of print for about four years. In the digital edition, an introduction has been added, as well as a “field guide” to the various apparitions that appear in the book, and three more stories.What you will read about in Icelandic Folk Legends:• The kvöldvaka—effectively a national institution, responsible for the full literacy of an impoverished nation• Icelandic folk... Lire plus…

Jackson Crawford (Translator & Editor)

Overview: "The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological and literary importance, containing the lion's share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc. Jackson Crawford's modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today's readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings." --Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Lire plus…

Moss, Sarah

A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath, from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children.� Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that for no apparent reason, 15-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing.� In that moment he is plunged into a world of waiting, agonising, not knowing. The story of his life and the lives of his family are rewritten and retold around this shocking central event, around a body that has inexplicably failed.� In this exceptionally courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life, Sarah Moss goes where most of us wouldn't dare to look, and the result is riveting - unbearably sad but also miraculously funny and ultimately hopeful. The Tidal Zone explores parental love, overwhelming fear, illness and recovery. It is about clever teenagers and the challenges of marriage. It is about the NHS, academia, sex and gender in the 21st century, the work-life juggle and the politics of packing lunches and loading dishwashers. It confirms Sarah Moss as a unique voice in modern fiction and a writer of luminous intelligence. Lire plus…

Moss, Sarah

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize for Historical Fiction Award-winning author Sarah Moss's most recent work of historical fiction is a portrait of a young couple's unconventional marriage as it's tested by separate quests for identity in work and life. Set in the Victorian Age, Signs for Lost Children grapples with central themes of early feminism, mental health reform, and marriage as an imposed institution. Ally Moberly, a recently qualified doctor, never expected to marry until she met Tom Cavendish. Only weeks into their marriage, Tom sets out for Japan, leaving Ally as she begins work at the Truro Asylum in Cornwall. Horrified by the brutal attitudes of male doctors and nurses toward their female patients, Ally plunges into the institutional politics of women's mental health at a time when madness is only just being imagined as treatable. She has to contend with a longstanding tradition of permanently institutionalizing women who are deemed difficult, all the while fighting to to be taken seriously as a rare woman in a profession dominated by men. Tom, an architect, has been employed to oversee the building of Japanese lighthouses. He also has a commission from a wealthy collector to bring back embroideries and woodwork. As he travels Japan in search of these enchanting objects, he begins to question the value of the life he left in England. As Ally becomes increasingly absorbed in the moral importance of her work, and Tom pursues his intellectual interests on the... Lire plus…