I had it in my head that these would be folkloric stories, but they're a lot more. I suppose speculative fits, but I'm really just delighted to find my favorite - fiction that is imaginative stories, not tailored to any marketing genre. I suspect my desire to transcend labels marks me as old more than anything else I say, but still I take great pleasure in anything that thwarts an algorithm and won't fit comfortably into a description. You tell good stories, and I'll listen. Anyway I really like this borderland imagination, I will certainly read more and might need to buy a copy for my permanent short story collection.
(A note, though, maybe take out Jagannath and use a different title.) ( )

What critics called Tidbeck’s ‘straightforward style’ came across to me as a taste for appropriate detail in both character and landscape. Tidbeck gives magical realism a good name. Her pacing flickers throughout the book, as she establishes a pattern of irregular occurrence, physical abnormality, and then revelation at the end that becomes not quite predictable, but not entirely surprising after the first few. The completeness of her world creation reminded me of Sofia Samatar, and something about the shape of her first few characters reminded me of Tom Holt’s sense of humor. ( )

Collections can be hit and miss, but this collection of Tidbeck's speculative stories is everything a reader could want in such a collection--the tales are unique, fresh, and ripe with characters and concepts that will stick with a reader long past the book has been closed. Even the themes which come up repeatedly are treated in such unique and interesting ways that there's no repetition felt, and what's especially impressive is that the shorter stories in the collection are just as striking as the longer ones. Among the stand-outs in the collection for me were "Beatrice" and "Who is Arvid Pekon?", as well as "Rebecka"--and these are among some of the shorter stories in the collection, though I think I'll come back to read them repeatedly.

I'd absolutely recommend this collection to all lovers of speculative fiction, as these stories have the depth and freshness of the best high-concept novels out there in all of the best ways possible. I'm a fan of Tidbeck for life after reading Jagannath. ( )

Jagannath is a collection of thirteen short stories by Swedish author, Karin Tidbeck. The stories are written in English, but have a distinct Nordic feel. Not very well known in the U.S., her writing style reminded me of Jonathan Carroll, whose genre might best be described as speculative fiction: a mixture of fantasy and folklore, with side orders of whimsy and weird. I'm not a big fan of short stories, but these ranged from 3-5 stars. Her afterword about the differences in writing between two languages was interesting as well. ( )

Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish fiction writer who writes in both Swedish and English, and does her own translations in both directions. In her afterword, she talks about both the challenges and the benefits--the concepts that can't really be translated, the ones that can't quite be translated, but don't add anything but an extra stumble for the reader who doesn't speak that language, the insights you can get by coming at a language from the outside.

She also talks about the experience of reading all of H. P. Lovecraft's work, more or less nonstop.

The stories here vary a lot, but overall have a touch of the surreal, as well as a perspective that's less familiar than that of writers who grew up in the English-speaking world. We see in this collection the impostor creature the pyret, and the vittra, a Scandinavian variety of the fae. We also meet intelligent machines that form close relationships with humans who care for them, and a far-future mechanical ark on a damaged Earth. There's variety, compelling characters, and fascinating stories, here,

Highly recommended.

I bought this audiobook. ( )