Finnish Fantasy Anthology Reviewed in Strange Horizons

Rose Fox reviews The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy over at the Strange Horizons site. And she likes it quite a lot:

Johanna Sinisalo, herself a prolific author and winner of the Finlandia Prize, has assembled a masterful collection of Finnish tales of the fantastic for this latest volume in the Dedalus European Fantasy series. — — This is clearly an anthology created by the Finns themselves, rather than by outsiders peering in and making value judgements based on their own disparate cultures, and it is worth taking a moment to appreciate that these works will now be so widely available to Anglophone audiences. Students of history will be particularly intrigued, and there’s also a good deal here to appeal to the more casual audience — — it’s a challenge worth taking on.

The book is a collection of Finnish short stories from the nineteenth century to present day, from a wide range of authors (many of them well respected mainstream authors—this is a collection you could well recommend to a friend who might normally be a bit wary of genre material). If you want to sample the Finnish fantastic, this collection offers an excellent opportynity for that.

Other reviewers have liked the book too. For example, in Scotsman.com:

This wonderful anthology is a fine addition to Dedalus's range of fantasy literature in translation, and is every bit as diverse and challenging as its predecessors. — — Every entry left me wanting to know more about these eerie authors.

And from the Independent Online:

These excellent stories share an edginess that's quite distinct from the quirkiness many contemporary English writers prefer to celebrate.