Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland

(Hardback)

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Out of the Blue is the first anthology of Icelandic short fiction published in English translation and features work by twenty of Iceland's most popular and celebrated living authors. The collection transports readers to Iceland's timeless and magical island of Vikings and geographical wonders, promising to be a seminal collection that will define Icelandic literature in translation for decades to come.

Reviews

"Out of the Blue reads like a series of lively dreams, by turns magical and stoic and strange, and each sensational. It's no surprise these stories come from the land of Halldor Laxness. He has an heir in these pages."Peter Geye, author of Wintering

"Out of the Blue is a collection of Icelands leading contemporary writers and all my favorite authors in one volume. Its an absolutely unique insight into Iceland's culture, mentality, and spirita country where the short story is as valued as the Sagas. If you plan to travel to Iceland and want to prepare, all you need to do is read this book."Jn Gnarr, writer and former mayor of Reykjavk

"Perhaps it is because philosophy reached these shores comparatively late that Icelandic writers have never felt bound by the truth. While recognizing no literature except that which springs from reality, they reserve the right to distort the truth according to the demands of their tales."Sjn, from the Foreword

"Helen Mitsios is to be congratulated on having compiled a highly readable and often entertaining miscellany of writing from a European literary culture that is still not as well known to the rest of the world as it ought to be."Nordic Voices in Translation

"This ambitious collection put out by the University of Minnesota Press is one of a kind."The Reykjavik Graepvine

"Offers a decent spectrum of Icelandic voices."Times Literary Supplement

"An excellent collection of short stories."Tonys Reading List

"These are stories by and about Icelanders, not Iceland filtered through a tourists lens. These are stories of life, love, family, and the tenuous yet unbreakable connections between our ancestral pasts and our mundane presents. And while theres something universal about those experiences, theres also something distinctly Icelandic about it. " American Book Review

Author Bio

Helen Mitsios is a poet, author, literary critic, and editor of the groundbreaking anthologies New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan, which was twice listed both as a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice and Summer Reading selection; also Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best Short Stories from Japan; and most recently Beneath the Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary Icelandic Poetry. An award-winning poet, she is author of If Black Had a Shadow and coauthor of Waltzing with the Enemy: A Mother and Daughter Confront the Aftermath of the Holocaust. She is a professor of languages and literature at Touro College and University System in New York City.

Sjnis an award-winning Icelandic author whose novels The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, From the Mouth of the Whale and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was have been translated into thirty-five languages. Also a poet, he has published nine poetry collections, written four opera librettos and lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in the film Dancer in The Dark. Sjn is the president of the Icelandic PEN Centre. He lives in Reykjavik.