Jansson, who spent nearly every summer of her life on the archipelagoes in the Gulf of Finland, knew how to decide what was essential.

There must be nothing unnecessary in it, one must be able to hold the tale enclosed in one’s hand.” Indeed, though Jansson’s books were always small, they were equipped as one would equip a boat for a journey between islands: with nothing unnecessary inside. “I love the short story,” she noted in the 1990s, “concentrated and united around a single idea. Even her novels, with one exception, are organized in vignettes.

She associated the short story with adulthood, and consequently, short stories make up the bulk of her adult work. These short forms were Jansson’s favorites. Sort of is also planning to bring out a volume of Jansson’s letters in 2015. Also released this year were The Listener, a short story collection, and Boel Westin’s biography Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, both from Sort of Books. The photograph I described above appears on the cover of The New York Review of Books’s recent edition of her selected stories, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories. Of the 11 novels and short story collections that Jansson produced between 19, eight have appeared in English and only one, Sun City, has gone out of print. In the years surrounding her centenary, Anglophone readers have been granted the joy of discovering this new side to the writer as her later work becomes increasingly available in English. Though she is still best known as a children’s author, Jansson spent the last 30 years of her life writing for adults. Born to Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, she achieved global fame in the late 1940s for her illustrated stories of the Moomins, a family of trolls who live with an assortment of odd, endearing characters in the idyllic Moominvalley. I, along with the millions of other readers who grew up on her Moomin books, wish that she had. She looks like the sort of person who should live forever. Jansson is facing the camera, smiling, her eyes closed against the sun, a wreath of flowers in her white hair. Behind her is the rocky island that formed her summer home. The photo is from the late 1980s or early ’90s, when Jansson was in her 70s. THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH of the writer Tove Jansson that shows her swimming in the Gulf of Finland.

A winter book by tove jansson