Leena Krohn on The New Yorker’s Best of 2015

Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction, an anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, made it onto The New Yorker‘s best-of list!

Cheeky Frawg krohn-cover-largeJoshua Rothman writes of his selection of Krohn for The Books We Loved in 2015 like this:

“I also found myself hypnotized by Leena Krohn, a Finnish writer whose collected stories and novels, rendered into English by many different translators, have just been published as a single volume, ‘Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction.’ Broadly speaking, Krohn is a speculative writer; one of the novels in the collection, for example, consists of thirty letters written from an insect city. (‘It is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face.’) Krohn writes like a fantastical Lydia Davis, in short chapters the length of prose poems. Her characters often have a noirish toughness; one, explaining her approach to philosophy, says that when she asks an existential question, ‘life answers. It is generally a long and thorough answer.’”

Just a week ago, Krohn’s anthology appeared on The A.V. Club‘s Best of 2015 list (along with The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen). Again, congratulations!

Found via Helsingin Sanomat.

P.S. Try Krohn’s Lucilia Illustris for free, published in December 2015 by Electric Literature.

Image via Cheeky Frawg Books

Two Finnish Authors on The A.V. Club’s Best of 2015

Two Finnish authors made it onto The A.V. Club‘s favorite books of the year. Their Best of 2015 list includes Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction, a whopper of an anthology (at 800+ pages in hardcover) edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen.

Jaaskelainen Krohn Covers

Keeping company to Krohn and Jääskeläinen on the Best of 2015 list “[a]fter a stellar year for the written word” are renowned authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Judd Apatow, and Paula Hawkins. Congrats, both!

For a taste of their writing, try Jääskeläinen’s Where the Trains Turn (orig. Missä junat kääntyvät, 2000), published in November 2014 by Tor.com, or Krohn’s Lucilia Illustris, published in December 2015 by Electric Literature.

Found via Helsingin Sanomat.

Images: The Rabbit Back Literature Society via Pushkin Press. Collected Fiction via Cheeky Frawg Books

Quotes: Men Everywhere, Doing Everything

“When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all the other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vague crowded picture of the world and all its activities. […] That vast background is full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling at the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building roads and bridges and high cathedrals, managing great businesses, teaching in all the colleges, preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything – ‘the world.’

“And when we say women, we think female – the sex.”

– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

View from a 100 years ago.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. Edited by Kathy Casey. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998 [originally published 1915], p. 116.

(This quote comes from my 21 new-to-me SFF authors reading project. Note: A free e-version is available on Project Gutenberg.)

This post has been edited for clarity.

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.