Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307386058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
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.
The Fish Can Sing
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307386058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307386058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
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.
Independent People
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 513
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307486265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 513
Book Description
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.
Under the Glacier
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307429881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
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.
Iceland's Bell
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
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.
Paradise Reclaimed
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307427234
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307427234
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
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.
World Light
Author: Halldor Laxness
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307430316
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 626
Book Description
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.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307430316
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 626
Book Description
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.
Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, but Enough
Author: Kyle Tran Myhre
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1638340102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
OF WHAT FUTURE ARE THESE THE WILD, EARLY DAYS? An exploration of the role that artists play in resisting authoritarianism with a sci-fi twist. In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe history of Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility. NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING is a: -post-apocalyptic road journal -alternate universe history of Hip Hop -“Letters to a Young Poet” -toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility.
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1638340102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
OF WHAT FUTURE ARE THESE THE WILD, EARLY DAYS? An exploration of the role that artists play in resisting authoritarianism with a sci-fi twist. In poetry, dialogue and visual art the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe history of Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility. NOT A LOT OF REASONS TO SING is a: -post-apocalyptic road journal -alternate universe history of Hip Hop -“Letters to a Young Poet” -toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders it's also a one-of-a-kind practitioners' take on poetry, power, and possibility.
Sing You Home
Author: Jodi Picoult
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439102724
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 477
Book Description
Ten years of infertility issues culminate in the destruction of music therapist Zoe Baxter's marriage, after which she falls in love with another woman and wants to start a family, but her ex-husband, Max, stands in the way.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439102724
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 477
Book Description
Ten years of infertility issues culminate in the destruction of music therapist Zoe Baxter's marriage, after which she falls in love with another woman and wants to start a family, but her ex-husband, Max, stands in the way.
Animals Can Sing
Author: M. O. Lufkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946844071
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36
Book Description
Animals Can Sing is a fun story where the reader goes on a short adventure in the woods. You'll visit with the bees, a wolf pup and other animals as you go deeper into a mystical forest. Told in rhyme, this delightful and fun children's picture book comes to life with a musical score printed on the last page that you can sing to, while enjoying the beautiful landscape illustrations of natural scenery that enhance your literary journey and captivate the imaginations of young readers.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946844071
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36
Book Description
Animals Can Sing is a fun story where the reader goes on a short adventure in the woods. You'll visit with the bees, a wolf pup and other animals as you go deeper into a mystical forest. Told in rhyme, this delightful and fun children's picture book comes to life with a musical score printed on the last page that you can sing to, while enjoying the beautiful landscape illustrations of natural scenery that enhance your literary journey and captivate the imaginations of young readers.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Author: Delia Owens
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735219109
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE—The #1 New York Times bestselling worldwide sensation with more than 18 million copies sold, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature.” For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens. Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735219109
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE—The #1 New York Times bestselling worldwide sensation with more than 18 million copies sold, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature.” For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens. Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.