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Not Before Sundown
Johanna Sinisalo's SF and fantasy stories have won a number of awards. Published in 2000, her first novel. Not Before Sundown, was considered Finland's best novel that year and won the prestigious Finlandia Award. Mikhael, a young, gay photographer finds in the courtyard of his high-rise apartment a small. man-like creature. It's a troll--a beast from Scandinavian legend, now used to frighten unruly children. It's a demonic beast, a hybrid like a werewolf. He calls him Pessi and then he makes a terrible mistake--he takes him home with him. Trolls exude pheromones and Pessi's cause Mikhael and others to fall in love with others, and those with yet others. What Mikhael fails to learn, with tragic consequences, is that Pessi the troll is the interpreter of man's darkest, most forbidden feelings. Sinisalo's novel quickly became a cult book in Finland, and is now being translated into five languages--here rendered into English by the noted translator, Herbert Lomas.
Troll
This internationally acclaimed winner of the Finlandia Award is “a brilliant and dark parable about the fluid boundaries between human and animal” (The Boston Globe). Angel, a young photographer, comes home from a night of carousing to find a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a wounded, helpless young troll. He takes it in, not suspecting the dramatic consequences of this decision. What does one do with a troll in the city? As the troll’s presence influences Angel’s life in ways he could never have predicted, it becomes clear that the creature is the familiar of man’s most forbidden feelings. A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, beguiling story of nature and man’s relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves. “[An] imaginative and engaging novel of urban fantasy . . . The stuff of ancient legend shadows with rather unnerving precision the course of unloosed postmodern desire.” —Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy
The latest volume in the Dedalus European fantasy series, this anthology of short stories includes a wide range of texts covering the period from nineteenth century until today. The richness and diversity of the stories reflects the long tradition of fantasy in Finnish literature, ranging from the classics to experimental literature, from satire to horror. This is the first collection of Finnish short stories of its kind and almost all are translated into English for the first time.
The Core of the Sun
The Finnish author of Troll: A Love Story delivers a work of “scathing satire . . . that sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut” (NPR). The Core of the Sun further cements Finlandia Award–winning author Johanna Sinisalo’s reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country’s unique take on it, dubbed “Finnish weird.” In an alternative historical present, The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labor and sterilized so that they do not carry on their “defective” line. Vanna, ra...
Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia
Scandinavian popular novels and films have flourished in the last thirty years. In Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, Andrew Nestingen argues that the growth and visibility of popular culture have been at the heart of the development of heterogeneous �publics� in Scandinavia, in opposition to the homogenizing influence of the post-World War II welfare state. Novels and films have mobilized readers and viewers, serving as a preeminent site for debates over individualism, collectivity, national homogeneity, gender, and transnational relations. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia provides insight into the changing nature of civil society in Scandinavia through the lens of popular culture. Nestingen develops his argument through the examination of genres where the central theme is individual transgression of societal norms: crime films and novels, melodramas, and fantasy fiction. Among the internationally known writers and filmmakers discussed are Henning Mankell, Aki Kaurism�ki, Lukas Moodysson, and Lars von Trier.
Lingua Cosmica
Anthologies, awards, journals, and works in translation have sprung up to reflect science fiction's increasingly international scope. Yet scholars and students alike face a problem. Where does one begin to explore global SF in the absence of an established canon? Lingua Cosmica opens the door to some of the creators in the vanguard of international science fiction. Eleven experts offer innovative English-language scholarship on figures ranging from Cuban pioneer Daína Chaviano to Nigerian filmmaker Olatunde Osunsanmi to the Hugo Award-winning Chinese writer Liu Cixin. These essays invite readers to ponder the themes, formal elements, and unique cultural characteristics within the works of t...
New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media
This collection of essays examines various forms of dystopian fiction in literature, television, and digital games. It frames the timely trend of dystopian fiction as a thematic field that accommodates several genres from societal dystopia to apocalyptic narratives and climate fiction, many of them examining the hazards of science and technology to human societies and the ecosystem. These are genres of the Anthropocene par excellence, capturing the dilemmas of the human condition in the current, increasingly precarious epoch. The essays offer new interpretations of classical and contemporary works, including the canonised prose of Orwell, Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, modern pop culture classics like Battlestar Galactica, Fallout and Hunger Games, and the work of Johanna Sinisalo, a pioneer of Finnish speculative fiction. From Thomas Pynchon to Watership Down, the volume’s multifaceted approach offers fresh perspectives to those already familiar with existing research, but it is no less accessible for newcomers to the ever-expanding field of dystopian studies.
Wonderbook
Now expanded: The definitive visual guide to writing science fiction and fantasy—with exercises, diagrams, essays by superstar authors, and more. From the New York Times-bestselling, Nebula Award-winning author, Wonderbook has become the definitive guide to writing science fiction and fantasy by offering an accessible, example-rich approach that emphasizes the importance of playfulness as well as pragmatism. It also embraces the visual nature of genre culture and employs bold, full-color drawings, maps, renderings, and visualizations to stimulate creative thinking. On top of all that, it features sidebars and essays—most original to the book—from some of the biggest names working in th...
The Half Brother
At the end of World War II, twenty-year-old Vera is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that rape is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a talented boxer. Vera’s young son, Barnum, forms a special but bizarre relationship with his half brother, fraught with rivalry and dependence as well as love. “I should have been your father,” Fred tells Barnum, “instead of the fool who says he is.” It is Barnum, who is now a screenwriter with a fondness for lies and alcohol, who narrates his family’s saga. As he shares his family’s history, he chronicles generations of independent women and absent and flawed men whom he calls the Night Men. Among them is his father, Arnold, who bequeaths to Barnum his circus name, his excessively small stature, and a con man’s belief in the power of illusion. Filled with a galaxy of finely etched characters, this prize-winning novel is a tour de force and a literary masterpiece richly deserving of the accolades it has received.
Nordic Gothic
Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.
