Embroidery

"Praise for History. A Mess: ""Absolutely brilliant from beginning to end.""--Halla Oddn� Magn�sd�ttir, National TV ""A complex and arresting novel where a super precise style and an ingenious construction come together.""--Nomination Committee for the Women's Literature Prize ""Like a cubist work of art.""--J�hanna Mar�a Einarsd�ttir, DV ""As her state of mind becomes increasingly fraught, Lytton Smith's adept translation skillfully conveys [the narrator's] neurotic, internal experience, which often expresses possibilities, thoughts, speculation, and interpretations instead of an external reality.""--Callum McAllister, Asymptote Journal ""History. A Mess is at once a disturbing but riveting portrait of a glassy psyche and an enlightening critique of the constraints and pressures of modern scholarship.""--Bailey Trela, Ploughshares ""Fans of the nouveau roman--Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, etc.--will be right at home here.""--Kirkus Reviews ""P�lsd�ttir writes with the hand of a mystery author and the mind of a postmodernist, teasing out her protagonist's problem while playing with literary forms, fragmenting timelines, and injecting fierce irony.""--Publishers Weekly ""Its ambition is met with resounding success every step of the way.""--Books and Bao ""What I admire most about P�lsd�ttir's writing is her ability to hide a strictly structured course of events under a gliding, occasionally deliberately (but not distractingly) chaotic style; her ability to orchestrate the random; to construct a perspective for the narrator that, most of the time, reveals both everything and nothing about what is actually going on; and the way she covers real tensions and worries with a quilt of details, as they are so often covered in life.""--Rein Raud, European Literature Network"