In this highly entertaining collection, Arnason employs all of his powers as a humorist and as a scholar intimate with North American and Icelandic mythology and culture. Whether set in a chilly Canadian city or an ancient Icelandic village, each story takes on an epic tone and suggests that there is a higher power hard at play, toying with people's destiny for its own amusement. Arnason's serpentine demon lover seduces and tempts women with his own style of forbidden fruit. His narrator considers the fate of lovers in an overturned canoe. And giants of incredible strength populate a remote and dying Icelandic village. Spanning worlds both mythological and real, the stories are recounted from an all-knowingbut not always all-revealingperspective.
