"A welcome, major contribution to modern Nordic literature in translation and a pleasure to read." -- Kirkus Reviews --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling." -- Alice Munro "Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas' shadow...to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland--he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity." -- "The Guardian" "The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor--oblique, stylized and childlike--that can be found in no other contemporary writer." -- "The Atlantic Monthly" "Laxness habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present...All his narratives...have a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force." -- "LA Times" "One of the world's most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists." -- Jane Smiley"

Halldor Laxness (1902-1998) is the undisputed master of modern Icelandic fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 "for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland." His body of work includes novels, essays, poems, plays, stories, and memoirs: more than sixty books in all. His works available in English include "Independent People," "The Fish Can Sing," "World Light," "Under the Glacier," "Iceland's Bell," and "Paradise Reclaimed." About the translator: Philip Roughton's translation of "Iceland's Bell" received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2001 and second prize in the 2000 BCLA John Dryden Translation Competition. His translation of Halldor Guomundsson's "The Islander: A Biography of Halldor Laxness" was recently released in the United Kingdom."