Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

welcome to the new Books from Finland website. After 42 years in print, we now navigate virtual worlds. However much Books from Finland may have changed in appearance, though, its essence remains the same – as always, we try to provide you with interesting, well-translated things to read. Made in Finland, or about Finland.

We operate on the internet, but the books we present you with still exist, for the most part, in print and paper.  Yet, as we all know, literature is not the same thing as books; neither, says the writer Leena Krohn in her article Digital dreams, are all books literature.  ‘Literature consists of aggregates of meanings called works,’ she writes;  these ‘meanings are common to all humanity’.

She goes on to muse on the effortless online ‘cloud’ computing of the immediate future, where we we will be free to share anything online with anyone, supported by software that we will not have to understand or even be conscious we are using our new website: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, reviews and news.

The two soul sisters in Sisters beneath the skin are the poet Edith Södergran and her friend, the critic and writer Hagar Olsson, who began sharing their dreams of a new world and a new art 90 years ago. Södergran’s courageously avant-garde poems from the second decade of the last century beautifully retain their sensuous beauty in the present age of shareable digital literature.

Dear fellow cybernauts, welcome on board our new literary spaceship! The journey is just beginning. We will be adding articles to our website constantly; please stay with us, and check our website often for what’s new – you can sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feeds, or simply make ours the opening page on your browser. And remember, keeping in touch is easier than ever before; please let us have your comments – brickbats or bouquets!

The editors