The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums

"Filled with charming illustrations, this delightful book about Iceland's 265 museums is as quirky and mesmerizing as the country's dreamscape itself." --Forbes

Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation, for readers of Atlas Obscura and fans of the Mütter Museum, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen?

In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects--a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams--can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. The world is chockablock with untold wonders, she writes, there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.

Author: A. Kendra Greene
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 05/12/2020
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.30h x 4.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780143135463


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/02/2020
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2020
Library Journal 05/01/2020 pg. 133
Booklist 04/15/2020 pg. 4

About the Author
A. Kendra Greene is a writer and artist who has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and the Dallas Museum of Art, where she was a writer in residence. She has an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa and has been the recipient of a Fulbright grant, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a Harvard Library Innovation Lab Fellowship. She lives in Dallas, Texas, where she has been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas and is a guest artist at Nasher Sculpture Center and an associate editor at Southwest Review.