About this item
Highlights
- Ordinary lives, quietly overturned.
- About the Author: Svava Jakobsdottir (1930-2004) was one of Iceland's leading contemporary authors and her short stories, often depicting the lives of women, hold a special place in Icelandic literature.
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
Ordinary lives, quietly overturned. Nothing is as stable as it seems.
Svava Jakobsdóttir is one of Iceland's most original and influential writers, known for her spare prose, surreal twists, and unflinching gaze at the pressures--both social and psychological--shaping women's lives. Under the Volcano collects three decades of short fiction that moves between domestic realism, bureaucratic absurdity, and sudden moments of eerie transformation.
The stories often begin in the familiar--a Reykjavík apartment, a strained marriage, a quiet dinner--and slide, almost imperceptibly, into the uncanny. Mountains appear indoors, houses vanish, time slips. Yet at the heart of each story is a precise exploration of how cultural expectations press in on the self, and how quietly those pressures distort identity.
Whether dramatizing the impossibility of selflessness, the absurdity of political life, or the fluid nature of memory, Jakobsdóttir's stories resist easy interpretation and reward close attention. Collected here in English for the first time, Under the Volcano reveals a fiercely intelligent writer whose unsettling, darkly elegant work continues to shape the landscape of Icelandic fiction.
About the Author
Svava Jakobsdottir (1930-2004) was one of Iceland's leading contemporary authors and her short stories, often depicting the lives of women, hold a special place in Icelandic literature. Jakobsdottir was also acclaimed as a playwright, literary scholar, and a novelist.
Meg Matich has received support for her literary translation work from PEN, Fulbright, the Icelandic Literature Center, and others, and frequently collaborates with UNESCO. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Prize for her translation of Magnús Sigurðsson's Cold Moons (Phoneme Media, 2017), which composer David R. Read LessScott subsequently translated into a choral symphony. In 2018, Meg translated an anthology in honor of the world's first democratically elected woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir (2019), and collaborated with Sigurðsson on an Icelandic poetry anthology for the Cafe Review. Her translation of þóra Hjörleifsdóttir's Magma is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic (US) and Picador (UK), and her translation of Auður Jónsdóttir's Quake is forthcoming from Dottir Press. She is the former director of The Poetry Brothel Reykjavik and producer of the upcoming immersive performance The Poetry Apothecary (Ljóðatek), in celebration of UNESCO Reykjavik's ten-year anniversary. Her translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from PEN America, Exchanges, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, Gulf Coast, and others.
