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Starlings by Solrún Michelsen

Translated by Kerri Pierce

Truth to tell, I’ve always thought that, when it comes to the animal kingdom, starlings are the creatures that most resemble humans. Could be that’s just wishful thinking.

Excerpt from Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

Translated by Owen Witesman

Imagine you are partially blind. Minus eleven diopters. Imagine a dark exam room at an optometrist’s office. You’re sitting in a comfortable leather chair, afraid you’ll lose your sight entirely. You’ve carefully placed your old glasses on the table. The plastic rims, electric-blue ten years ago, are scuffed now.

The Nationsoul of My Dear Jon by Birkir Blær

Translated by Meg Matich

The most preposterous figure in Icelandic folklore is the indomitable wife of My Dear Jon who travels to the kingdom of heaven with the soul of her husband in a sack, to smuggle him into Paradise; she’s a woman who slings insults at the saints and slut shames the Virgin Mary before Jesus Christ himself arrives at the gates of heaven to bid her, with ceremonious tact, to get lost.

April 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Queenship in Medieval France, 1300-1500 by Murielle Gaude-Ferragu, translated from the French by Angela Krieger

Reviewed by Zita Eva Rohr

While the stories of medieval kings, and indeed their kingships, have received considerable scholarly attention for decades, if not for a hundred years or more, studies of medieval queens, and queenship in general, as legitimate fields of cross-disciplinary research really only received their “shot in the arm” following John Carmi Parson’s ground-breaking and durable collection of essays, Medieval Queenship, first published in 1993.

Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagination by Douglas R. Burgess JR.

Reviewed by Crosbie Smith

This is an ambitious, provocative, and at times idiosyncratic book. The dust-jacket fly-leaf declares its broad aims as the telling of “the story of the complex relationship between the Victorians and their wondrous steamships … it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where an empire felt powerful and anything seemed possible – if there was an engine behind it.”

Katrine Ogaard Jensen; Kayla Maiuri; Nordic Voices

New Nordic Voices

By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri

A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.