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Eliza Reid Announces New Murder Mystery Book
Eliza Reid, First Lady of Iceland, has announced on her personal Instagram that she has written a new book. According to the post, the new book is called Death Of A Diplomat and is “a classic, closed room, British-style murder mystery that…
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The Mysterious Book Of Sorcerer’s Screed
Need to wake up the dead? Look no further. It has to be said before we continue; Galdraskræða, or Sorcerer’s Screed, is a dangerous book and should be handled with caution and respect. This is an odd tome, its first version was…
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Culture Pick: The Reykjavík Literary Festival
The biennial Reykjavík International Literary Festival is slated to take place from September 8th to the 11th in two historic buildings at either end of Tjörnin. During the day, interviews will be conducted at Nordic House while the evenings will highlight author…
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Tree Murder And “Leaf” Erikson: Lóa’s View Of Icelandic Life
Many visitors to Iceland might be familiar with the work of Lóa Hlín Hjálmtýsdóttir without even knowing it. Her sharply observed cartoons appear regularly in various Icelandic publications (including this one), and are often shared widely on social media. They vary between…
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Look Into the Light, Man!
Despite its late-night silence, eerie for a city of its size, most would not consider Reykjavík a particularly spooky place. One might be hard-pressed to argue otherwise, but novelist Steinar Bragi has certainly tried with his collection of Icelandic ghost stories, ‘The…
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The Way We Live Now
Taking its inspiration from idiosyncratic headlines around the globe, ‘News Muse’ by Vala Hafstað combines two very Icelandic interests–the daily news and poetry–and uses them to paint a sometimes amusing, often ridiculous portrait of contemporary life. With a few notable exceptions, the…
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The Book Cellar’s Book Seller
Narratives of Reykjavík’s used book culture often take the form of jeremiads—languorous laments for a bygone heyday, a paradise lost through, by and with the fall of print media. By some estimations, there used to be as many as forty secondhand book…
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Two New Guidebooks To Iceland
Need to buy a guidebook to Iceland? You can choose from Lonely Planet, the Rough Guides, Frommer’s, Insight Guides, and the Bradt Guides. Don’t want to pay? The annually updated Around Iceland is available as a free PDF download from heimur.is/world, and…
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Absolutely Fable-ous!
Twelve volumes and counting, with no end in sight, Fables by Bill Willingham is probably Vertigo’s finest on-going series. It tells the story of a particularly special community of immigrants in New York—namely, characters out of fables. Snow White, Prince Charming, Beauty,…
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I’ll Have What He’s Having
Are you tired of writing your own damn poems? Does it feel like you’d rather plunge through the fiery gates of hell rather than come up with one more metaphor/ simile/ aphorism to explain the human condition? There’s so much poetry in…
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Dungeon (The Series)
French humour has sometimes been described as “not funny” or “weird”. Lewis Trondheim is both French and funny. He’s so prolific as a cartoonist that it’s tempting to think he runs a sweatshop with tubby little illustrators that are fed with croissants…
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Speaking Like A God
They say human beings use language to make sense of their surroundings. We frame, categorise and systematise the objects around us with the help of nouns and verbs and adjectives. The sky is blue. The horse gallops swiftly. The sentence is a…
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The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
The title and blurb of this book leads you to think it’s about Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, the wife of Þorfinnur Karlsefni and mother of Snorri Þorfinnsson, the first European child to be born on the North American continent. But in fact, The Far…
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Frank Castle, The Punisher: Six Hours to Kill
Like so many readers and writers of this beloved mag, you’re probably a bleeding heart liberal. You’re against whale hunting and capital punishment. That’s okay, this reviewer is too. Kinda. On a good day. Well, killing is wrong. Even killing killers (even…
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Funny, Colourful Filth
The comic strips in “The Trial of Colonel Sweeto” are hilarious and multicoloured and filthy like uhm…. like rainbow poop. The majority of PBF strips have these simple white bald smiley-face characters. Those and the humour are the defining recognisable trades of…
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A Traveler’s Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales
While traveling around Iceland, tourists will often hear stories of Icelandic folk legends. In A Traveler’s Guide To Iceland, Jón R. Hjálmarsson attempts to provide some insight into these tales. To that end, he invites the reader on an imaginary road trip…
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Troll’s Cathedral
Trolls´Cathedral (original Icelandic title Tröllakirkja) is the first part of an acclaimed trilogy by author Ólafur Gunnarsson (the two other being Potter´s Field and Winter Journey, respectively). The novel was published in 1992 and nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize the same…
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Must Love Zombies
There is something very addictive in this ongoing, apparently non-stop series. What can it be? Its 10th paperback volume is out now, and still there is no apparent plot, the characters are kind of regular and the dialogue is kind of regular…