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-knowing-but not always all-revealing-perspective.

David Arnason was born in Gimli, Manitoba, in 1940. He has a Master’s Degree from the University of Manitoba and a PhD from the University of New Brunswick. He divides his time between Winnipeg, where he teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba, and Gimli, where he does most of his writing. He has also taught Canadian literature and creative writing in Tasmania, Trier, and Strasbourg.His works include two collections of poetry, Marsh Burning and Skrag, and four collections of short stories: Fifty Stories and a Piece of Advice, The Circus Performer’s Bar, The Happiest Man in the World, and The Pagan Wall.

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