Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson

Maria Helga Gu Mundsdottir

"Each of Sverrisson's stories offers an intricate study in the precariousness of life, the frailty of every fleeting opportunity. Characters are scarred by simple, careless actions. Lives turn on the smallest events: a child steals cash from his father for a pretend-money game and unwittingly throws his brother's entire life off balance; a man has a one-night stand with a married woman and only realises the consequences years later; an overbearing girlfriend sends her cynical boyfriend a letter that stops him in his tracks. Yet amid the anonymity of urban life, the random accidents and mistaken identities that make up Sverrisson's stories, there can also be found an abiding faith in the unexpected gifts that chance throws up: synchronicities, coincidences, moments in time seen from new perspectives that offer fresh secrets, and, occasionally, even a second chance"--Back cover.

Twice in a Lifetime

David Constantine

Arnon Grunberg

Jacques Réda

Larissa Boehning

Emil Hakl

Amanda Michalopoulou 

Empar Moliner

Aldo Nove.

Dalibor Šimpraga

Decapolis is a book which imagines the city otherwise. Bringing together ten writers from across Europe, it offers snapshots of their native cities, freezing for a moment the characters and complexities that define them. Ten cities: diverse, incompatible, contradictory in everything from language to landscape. In Amsterdam every Friday night, a lonely woman cooks for her men, a circle of middle-aged bachelors. In Barcelona, a self-regarding poet tries to capture the essence of the city in an eleven-word lyric. In Reykjavik, an unemployed journalist wanders through the deserted buildings of the newspaper he once wrote for. In all cases, these are cities in states of transition: Zagreb in the shadow of the Balkan conflict; Manchester on the cusp of social and economic change; Berlin with half its industrial buildings abandoned like the Mary Celeste. The ultimate untranslatability of these cities experiences is never in question, and yet through these fractured, isolated glimpses chance encounters, snatches of conversation, local TV bulletins something quite unlikely begins to emerge: a commonality grounded in the fleeting and the momentary, a continuum, perhaps, of urban experience *'Deca-Polis': Greek for ten-cities.

Tales from Ten Cities

Decapolis

Andri Snær Magnason

Þórarinn Eldjárn

Friðgeir Einarsson

Einar Már Guðmundsson

Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir

Auður Jónsdóttir

Björn Halldórsson

Fríða Ísberg

Kristín Eiríksdóttir

Reluctant to observe a new family tradition, a boy finds himself stranded outside a graveyard on the night before Christmas... Three farming brothers, forced to relocate to the city by poor harvests, discover an unexpected demand for their green-fingered talents... Residents of a new apartment block are woken in the early hours by the eerie sound of a table saw that once operated on the building’s grounds... Iceland is a land of stories; from the epic sagas of its mythic past, to its claim today of being home to more writers, more published books and more avid readers, per head, than anywhere in the world. As its capital (and indeed only city), Reykjavik has long been an inspiration for these stories. But, as this collection demonstrates, this fishing-village-turned-metropolis at the farthest fringe of Europe has been both revered and reviled by Icelanders over the years. The tension between the city and the surrounding countryside, its rural past and urban present, weaves its way through The Book of Reykjavik, forming an outline of a fragmented city marked by both contradiction and creativity. Includes a foreword written by award-winning Icelandic author Sjón. Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Philip Roughton, Lytton Smith, Meg Matich and Larissa Kyzer. Published with the support of the Icelandic Literature Center.

A City in Short Fiction

The Book of Reykjavik

Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson

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