The Moomin canon, by contrast, has been well-tended in America with not only the children’s novels but picture books published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and with Drawn & Quarterly’s series of splendid editions of Jansson’s comic strips, which originally appeared in the Swedish-language newspaper Ny Tid and the London Evening News through the 1950s. But to split Jansson’s oeuvre into the serious and the commercial, the mature work versus children’s caprices, would be to miss the subtle, encompassing marvel of her project in fiction. For picture book and novella speak to one another, engage in a quiet but impassioned discussion of making and singing, lying and living. Whether a small troll living in a forest valley or a superannuated auntie summering on a Baltic skerry, Tove Jannson’s characters are artists every one. In love and resentment, ambition and rejection, the problems they address are artist’s problems: problems of noticing, representing oneself to others, and the power of names. Her tales have much to offer in this time of networked culture, when everyone is a kind of artist engaged in a perpetual exhibition of the self. And when hasn’t this been the case?