The Year of the Hare: Pushkin Classics

"This is escapism at its best. . . . Really, it's just pure fun, like an adult fairy tale-a fantasy of what might happen if one day you just said, 'Oh, the hell with it.' "
-Lynn Neary, NPR.org

"[A] wonderful book . . . If you are too timid to actually cut all the ties to your 'civilized' life, but still have a yearning to get away from clocks and calendars, Arto Paasilinna's The Year of the Hare provides the perfect escape literature. . . . The humor in this book just sneaks up on you. . . . [It] will have you laughing and gasping by turns. . . . The writing is as spare and clean as the lines of Scandinavian design. . . . Of the many lines in this book that I cherished, the last is one of the most delicious: 'Vatanen is a man to be reckoned with.' So is this book."
-Lonely Planet

"A fable of the joys of freedom . . . The hare proves to be a delightful, undemanding, and loyal companion, who can laugh, listen, and feel embarrassment."
-The Boston Globe

"Paasilinna's style is all Finn-a sly sense of humor, a simplicity, a moral compass that points firmly north and out of doors, away from cities. . . . Readers root for Vatanen as he leaps off the mad merry-go-round."
-Los Angeles Times

"Compelling . . . You might just find yourself wishing for a hare to enter your life in the near future."
-Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Beguiling, gently ironic . . . [an] ode to spontaneity and serendipity."
-National Geographic Traveler

"[A] joy . . . The glory of the outdoors is celebrated here, through each season, and we can nearly smell the early clover and meadow vetchling of the hare's diet. . . . Vatanen is who we want to be [and] who we yearn to be brave enough to become, as soon as we stop waiting for the timing to be right."
-BookPage

"Hilarious . . . With its fiercely independent protagonist and its depiction of Finland's wild northland, this comic novel will offer readers a rare opportunity to experience Finland and read one of that country's most popular authors."
-Library Journal

"The Year of the Hare offers enjoyable yarns: fun adventures, agreeably related. . . . It's so good-natured and has so much varied action-and that animal-appeal-that it makes for a consistently enjoyable read."
-The Complete Review

"Exhilarating . . . The sheer literary delight of Arto Paasilinna's comic novels is one of the best-kept secrets in Finland. . . . You'll want to laugh out loud at all the good parts, and savor every lean, simple, honest sentence."
-Shelf Awareness

"The Year of the Hare is only the most Finnish, and perhaps most antically Zen-ish, of a shelf-load of books that tell us to find and live by our own ideas of contentment."
-The Wall Street Journal

"An exemplary comic novel, full of amiable if binding warnings about the septic follies of civilization-to be read with rising anxiety and delight."
-Thomas McGuane

"Step out of the domestic gulag and into The Year of the Hare, a novel that depicts the confident freedom of the journeyman. I loved it."
-Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

"I love The Year of the Hare. . . . Which of us wouldn't secretly want to live in a novel as fresh and as full of events as this one?"
-Pico Iyer, from the Foreword

"Paasilinna has been amusing Finns for thirty years and readers in twenty-five languages."
-The New York Times