Thursday, August 2, 2018

Top ten artificial humans in fiction

Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel The Blue Fox (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel From The Mouth Of The Whale was shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was was awarded every Icelandic literature prize, among them the 2013 Icelandic Literary Prize. His latest published work is the definite edition of the trilogy CoDex 1962.

One of his top ten artificial humans in fiction, as shared at the Guardian:
On Dolls, edited by Kenneth Gross

Gross brings together in one beautiful volume key texts about the uncanny world of inanimate beings, by authors including Walter Benjamin, Marina Warner, Sigmund Freud (on ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman) and Heinrich Von Kleist. The latter’s On the Marionette Theatre makes the unsettling case that the marionettes’ experience is superior to man’s bondage in living flesh.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue