2008 Twin Cities Book Festival

Join us as Icelandic author Bragi Ólafsson rocks the house! In The Pets, his first novel to be translated into English, Olafsson gives us a hilarious novel of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity—not to mention whose main character is hiding under a bed! Influenced as much by filmmakers like Tati and David Lynch as by literary forebears from Gogol to Harold Pinter, Olafsson’s writing has been taking Europe by storm, but the storm comes to Minnesota this October!

Bragi Ólafsson played bass guitar for The Sugarcubes, the internationally renowned avant-garde pop group that featured Björk as lead vocalist. He is the author of several books of poetry and short stories, and four novels, including Time Off, nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize, and Party Games, for which he received the DV Cultural Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Ambassador, received the Icelandic Bookseller’s Award as best novel of the year. Bragi is also one of the founders of the book and record publishing company smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and has translated Paul Auster’s City of Glass into Icelandic.