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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2019 edition World Literature: Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden. & Denmark

The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe, Michael Pye

      A History of the Vikings, Gwynn Jones

     The Viking World, Brink ed

     Norse Mythology, John Lindow

     The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, Margaret Ross

     The Last Viking Trilogy: The Golden Horn, The Road of the Sea Horse, The Sign of the Raven, Poul Anderson

     The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth, Alan Cutler

     The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman

     Edvard Munch: behind the scream, Strindberg: a life, Sue Prideaux

     The Poetic Edda, Jackson Crawford ed

     The Saga of the Volsungs with the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Crawford ed.

     The Legend of Brynhild, Andersson

     Rhinegold, Attila’s Treasure, Stephan Grundy

     Egil’s Saga

     Heimskringla: or, The Lives of the Norse Kings, The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson

     Njal’s Saga

     The Vinland Sagas

     Laxdaela Saga

     Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas by Gary Lachman

     The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.

     The Happy Warriors, Iceland’s Bell, Independent People, The Fish Can Sing, Under the Glacier,  World Light,  Halldór Kiljan Laxness

     Inferno, A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata, A Madman’s Manifesto, August Strindberg

     Selected Poems, Tomas Transtromer

     The Lowenskold Ring, Charlotte Lowenskold, Anna Svard, Selma Lagerlof

     The Death of a Beekeeper, The Tennis Players, A Time in Xanadu, Sigismund, Lars Gustafson

     Complete Poems, Kallocain, Karin Boye

     Complete Major Prose Plays of Ibsen, Rolf Fjelde (Translation)

     The Quintessence of Ibsenism, by George Bernard Shaw

     Nothing Grows by Moonlight, Torborg Nedreaas

     The Dwarf, Par Lagervist

     Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

     The Royal Physician’s Visit, P.O. Enquist

     Krane’s Cafe :An Interior With Figures, The Leech, Cora Sandel

     The Downfall of the Gods, Tutelary Tales, Another Metamorphosis and Other Fictions, Villy Sorenson

     We the Drowned, Carsten Jensen

     The Boat of Longing, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later, Their Fathers’ God, O. E. Rolvaag

     Babette’s Feast, Out of Africa, Shadows on the Grass, Ehrengard, Dinesen

     Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)

     The Forest of Hours, Kerstin Ekman

     Days with Dian Or: Life at Night, Svend Age Maddsen

     Collected Fiction: Lena Krohn

     History of Danish Dreams, Borderlines, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg

     The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, The Expo Files, Stieg Larsson

     A Time for Everything, Autumn, Winter, Karl Ove Knausgaard

     The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, From the Mouth of the Whale, Moonstone, Codex 1962, Sjon

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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