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 Icel
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 pa
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 live
When the Americans make an offer to buy land in Iceland to build a NATO airbase after the Second World War, a storm of protest is provoked throughout the country. Narrated by a country girl from the north, the novel follows her experiences after she takes
A novel of Iceland -- a queer, repellant sort of Iceland at that. The story of a prostitute and her child, victim of her passions, her selfishness, and her ill-fame -- and of their attempt to find a place for themselves in a new community which is unfrien
Sometimes grim, sometimes uproarious, and always captivating, Iceland’s Bell by Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness is at once an updating of the traditional Icelandic saga and a caustic social satire. At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppress
A beautiful literary anthology published to commemorate the International Polar Year—and remind us what we're in danger of losing.The Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have been an object of obsession for as long as we've known they existed. Countless ex
This magnificent novel—which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature—is at last available to contemporary American readers. Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics
"[The protagonist's] grand, egotistical journey begins with art and ends with God, taking a path marked out by tormented disquisitions on all manner of existential questions."—New York Times Book Review“Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the
