My war book

I'm not sure how much I've been talking here about my project about Finnish war-time stories about, well, the war. The focus is on stories that were published in various magazines during the Second World War (meaning the Winter War and the Continuance War). The book has been pretty difficult to compile and I've done lots of work to find and contact heirs of the writers - there's only one living writer in the bunch!

But now the book's coming to be, finally. I've managed to assemble 21 short stories for it, ranging from outright war propaganda with dubious political agenda to straight pulp action and Leftist critique of the war. Almost all of the writers are well-known Finnish authors, but there's at least one amateur in the bunch, and also some pretty forgotten writers and hacks. I've also written a lengthy foreword for the book.

I posted some stuff about the book on one of my other blogs. Here's the table of contents, with bibliographic info on original appearances, and here and here are two stories that a friend of mine typed, but that weren't included in the book in the end. I'm posting the foreword in some point, but I'll let you know. On the same blog there are several other pieces relating to the war book - check them out.

Oh? When will it be available? I hope already in the beginning of November - the book will be published in POD, so the printing process shouldn't take much time. I'm sad to say we won't make it to the Helsinki Book Fair that was the original plan. The title of the book, by the way, is Tankki palaa! / The Tank Is Burning!, after the title of the short story by Tenho Palsa, who, accidentally, is the only amateur writer in the book, a tank sergeant who won numerous writing contests for the war-time magazines, but never published a book.