Jagannath

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It’s rare, almost unheard of, to encounter an author so extraordinarily gifted she appears to have sprung full-blown into the literary world, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But we live in extraordinary times, and with Karin Tidbeck, we appear to have gotten the artist our times deserve.

A hundred years ago, the great fantasist Lord Dunsany wrote of the world beyond the fields we know. With the ascent of fantasy as the dominant popular literary form of the early twenty-first century, we’ve seen that world grow increasingly gentrified, commodified, and mainstreamed. This is a long way of saying that, when it comes to speculative fiction, it takes a lot to surprise me. I can’t think of when I last read a collection that blew me away the way that Jagannath has, or one that’s left me somewhat at a loss to describe just how strange and beautiful and haunting these tales are.

Of course, Tidbeck’s appearance on the literary scene isn’t quite as sudden as it seems to me. She’s been publishing for a decade, and many of the stories contained herein first appeared in her native Sweden, where they were collected in Vem är Arvid Pekon? English translations of several of these tales have been published in U.S. and U.K. magazines and anthologies. In 2010 she attended the prestigious Clarion Writer’s Workshop, a longtime proving ground for writers who have gone on to become major voices in the field. She’s also one of the few writers of the fantastic to have received a grant from the Swedish Authors Fund. Her first novel will be published this year in Sweden.

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