Translated by Viivi Hyvönen

Recommended by Jeff VanderMeer

Issue No. 186





Do you remember, my love, the object we saw, on that temperate summer morn:

-Charles Baudelaire



The unused sidetrack led to an overgrown yard of a derelict factory. This was the Ultima Thule of the city, the kind of neighborhood people moved into only if they had no alternative. It had housing projects, a supermarket, a primary school, two kiosks, a bus terminus, some paint factories and National Railways’ storage areas.

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About the Author

Leena Krohn (born in 1947 in Helsinki) is a critically acclaimed Finnish author. Her large and varied body of work includes novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. In her books she deals with topics that include the relationship between imagination and morality, the evolution of synthetic forms of life, and the future of our species.

Krohn has received several prizes for both adult and children’s fiction, including the Finlandia Prize for literature in 1992, the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1997; returned in protest for ethical reasons), and the Aleksis Kivi Fund Award for lifetime achievement in 2013. Her short novel Tainaron: Mail From Another City was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005. Her books have been translated into English, German, Bulgarian, French, Estonian, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish and Italian. Leena Krohn used digital tools in her literary work well before they became popular in mainstream literary circles.





About the Translator

Viivi Hyvönen is a Finnish writer best known for her novel The Monkey and the New Moon, which has sometimes been categorized as “new weird” literature.

About the Guest Editor

Jeff VanderMeer’s most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted The New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.” VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.



“Lucilia Illustris” is excerpted from LEENA KROHN: THE COLLECTED FICTION (Cheeky Fawg Books, 2015) by permission of the publisher and the translator.





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