Already celebrated far beyond his native Iceland, the novels of Sjón arrive on waves of praise from writers, critics, and readers worldwide. Sjón has won countless international awards and earned ringing comparisons to Borges, Calvino, and Iceland's other literary superstar, the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. The Whispering Muse is his masterpiece so far. The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilization, has had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travelers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on its quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. What unfolds is a slender but masterful, brilliant, and always entertaining novel that ranges deftly from the comic to the mythic as it weaves together tales of antiquity with the modern world in a voice so singular as to seem possessed. An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013 : Fish, myth, and pith form the foundation of this quick, quirky tale from celebrated Icelandic author Sjón. It's 1949 and a merchant ship embarks upon its maiden voyage. At the captain's dinner table, competing tale-tellers vie for the attention of their fellow travelers. The first is our tedious narrator, a retired journal editor who takes great pride in his theories and lectures on the connections between a fish-based diet and Nordic strength. But his oratorical skills (not to mention his subject of choice) pale in comparison to those of the ship's first mate, who in mysterious first-person detail shares the enthralling exploits of Jason and the Argonauts. Sjón artfully weaves the two together to comprise his own compellingly spun story; one that is over far too soon. -- -- Robin A. Rothman Invited to be the sole guest passenger on the 1949 maiden cruise of the new and largest cargo ship of the Kronos line—owned by the father of his late, most ardent disciple—aged scholar Valdimar Haraldsson, whose passion has been to link “fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race,” is intrigued to learn that the voyage, from Norway to Turkey, overlaps Jason and the Argonauts’ expedition for the Golden Fleece. Moreover, every evening after dinner, the second mate, Caelius, after seemingly consulting a piece of driftwood, tells the Argo’s story. He says he was in Jason’s crew those thousands of years ago, though in Apollonius’ Argonautica, Caelius is an Argonaut’s father, not an Argonaut, and he interpolates part of the Volsunga saga (source of Wagner’s Ring operas), tweaked so that it anticipates Jason’s subsequent sad fate (actually, Argonauts preceded Volsungs by a millennium). Poet, pop lyricist, and novelist Sjón juxtaposes those mixed-up old mythologies and the detritus of the far more recent racial-national mythologies that eventuated in WWII, though suggestively, almost invisibly. See also The Blue Fox. --Ray Olson “ The Whispering Muse is a quirky, melodic, ticklish, seamlessly translated, lovingly polished gem of a novel.” ― David Mitchell “An extraordinary, powerful fable--a marvel.” ― Alberto Manguel “Sjón is the trickster that makes the world, and he is achingly brilliant.” ― Junot Díaz “When I need something epic and lyrical I call upon Sjón.” ― Björk “Sjón's writing [is] full of brilliant details, surprises and delights . . . [He is] an extraordinary and original writer.” ― A. S. Byatt, The Guardian Born in Reykjavík in 1962, Sjón is the author of the novels The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse, From the Mouth of the Whale, Moonstone, and CoDex 1962 , for which he won several awards, including the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize and the Icelandic Literary Prize. He has also been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and his work has been translated into thirty-five languages. In addition, Sjón has written more than seven poetry collections, several opera librettos, and lyrics for various artists, including Björk. He was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in Dancer in the Dark , and he cowrote the script of the film The Northman with its director, Robert Eggers. In 2017 he became the third writer – following Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell – to contribute to Future Library, a public artwork based in Norway spanning one hundred years. He lives in Reykjavík, Iceland.