Articles
Re-inventing the book: on the papernet, pod and the unbook
20 May 2009 | Articles, Non-fiction
Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda
Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book
Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy. More…
Sisters beneath the skin — the letters of Edith Södergran and Hagar Olsson
11 February 2009 | Articles, Authors, Extracts
Edith Södergran and Hagar Olsson. – Photos: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Åbo Akademis bildsamlingar.
Almost one hundred years ago, a remote Karelian village close to St Petersburg, near the Finno-Russian border, saw the birth of a fearless new form of modern poetry.
The Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923) began writing her burning lines inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of the new man and his philosophy of creativity. Södergrans’ poems were free of any traditional pattern and full of strong images.
Her work, which ran to six collections of poems, later achieved classic status in the modernist traditon that she presaged.
What if?
30 December 2001 | Articles, Authors
For an extraordinary period between 1944 and 1956 part of Finland – the Porkkala peninsula, close to Helsinki – was leased to the Soviet Union as a military base. Inspired by the photographs by Jan Kaila, Olli Jalonen explores those silenced and mysterious years, which prompted Finns to ask the question: what if the whole of Finland had succumbed to the same fate?
In the autumn of 1944, the Soviet Union set up an enormous military base close to Helsinki. The Porkkala area, which had been forcibly leased from Finland for 50 years, was returned to the Finns early, in 1956. Completely divorced from its surroundings and strongly armed, the foreign power’s base was like a bear sleeping in Finland’s back yard. It has left in the minds of Finns hidden images of silence, fear and mystery. More…