Tender Bodies
Selkie Stories Are for Losers
Ogres of East Africa
Walkdog
The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle
Olimpia’s Ghost
Honey Bear
How I Met the Ghoul
Those
A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals
How to Get Back to the Forest
Tender Landscapes
Tender
A Brief History of Nonduality Studies
Dawn and the Maiden
Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold
An Account of the Land of Witches
Request for an Extension on the Clarity
Meet Me in Iram
The Closest Thing to Animals
Fallow
The Red Thread
Advance reading copies.
Coop.
National radio and TV interviews
Excerpts in Lightspeed, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Strange
Horizons.
Advertising online and in F&SF, Rain Taxi, Conjunctions.
Promotion on the author's website: www.sofiasamatar.com
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking
engagements.
Sofia Samatar: Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. She has written for The Guardian, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld, among others, and has won the John W. Campbell Award, the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She lives in Virginia.
Praise for Tender: Most of the 20 sumptuous tales in Sofia
Samatar's collection Tender take place on Earth - although not
always the Earth we might recognize. Sprawling in subject from the
supernatural power of names to the loneliness of a half-robot
woman, Tender redefines the emotional power and literary heft that
speculative fiction can convey. Where Samatar's acclaimed fantasy
novels exist in a strange, dreamlike world, her short stories
daringly explore the overlap of familiarity and otherness." -- NPR
Best of 2017When Tender was published last spring, I had been
waiting for a short-story collection from Sofia Samatar for what
felt like 10 million years. Samatar is a novelist, poet, scholar,
and author of science fiction and fantasy stories, and this book
combines previously published award-winning short fiction with two
new pieces, a novella and a story, that give life to the breadth
and width of her astonishing imagination."-- Carmen Maria Machado,
The WeekThis is a short story collection containing wonder after
wonder, done with casual intensity. These are all sharp knives of
stories, and it's definitely possible to think oneself unsliced
until the blood starts to pour. I encountered Samatar's short work
in 2012, probably, with her short 'Selkie Stories are for Losers, '
and was floored on sight. She's published two novels as well, but
the short fiction is my first love. Unlike the rest of the authors
on this list, I actually know Sofia, and I'm as moved by her in
person as I am by her work. Her wide-ranging and deeply researched
interests are fully showcased in her prose, which moves from
nonfiction to speculative surrealism, from historical automatons to
victims of warfare, all at the same time. There are witch stories,
and ripped from the headline stories, stories about longing for
other planets, stories about the human condition of pain. They
cross all genre divides, and smash them. This collection was edited
by Kelly Link, herself a lighthouse of mine, and her work has
common ground with Samatar's, just as both of their work has common
ground with everything else on this list. These are all authors
whose works are sui generis, but who constitute a tribe of writer
warriors as far as I'm concerned. Everyone here is an obliterator
of tropes and received myth, a reviser of hierarchy, and a deeply
skilled storyteller and maker of worlds. I can't even believe I get
to live in a time in which writers like the ones on this list
exist, let alone get to have their brains feed mine." -- Maria
Dahvana Headley, Electric LitA wide-ranging collection by an author
who is as at home in a contemporary satire as she is in a
beautifully atmospheric fable. For readers who love seeing what a
master can do with short fiction." -- Jenn Northington, Book
RiotSamatar is a master at not only weaving imaginative tales, but
deftly layering them with emotional truths. While some stories are
playful, many are sad, and others are disturbing. Many of the
stories are suspenseful, not necessarily because of their
structures, but from not quite knowing the emotional terrain
they'll tackle. And yet it's easy to trust Samatar as she takes you
into unfamiliar territory with prose that is skillful, controlled,
and lovely." -- Rachel Le�n, Chicago Review of BooksA relentless,
challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar's Tender
transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and
monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text,
demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and
themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a
way of getting under your skin." -- Ilana Teitelbaum, Los Angeles
Review of BooksTender's longest story is also a science fiction
tale set in the future -- and like 'The Red Thread, ' it toys with
the ambiguity between dystopia and utopia. Told from the
perspective of a child named Agar Black Hat, who lives in an
extraterrestrial colony after cataclysmic climate change and a
universal draft have forced a sect of religious pacifists from
Earth, the story is a feast of ideas. It's reminiscent of vintage
Ursula K. Le Guin in its combination of social science and hard
sci-fi, even as it probes the nature of belonging and belief. The
book's beating heart, though, is its title story. 'Tender' starts
out with a clever play on words -- 'tender' is used as a noun, as
in, one who tends -- and employs some tricky unreliable narration
and splintered points-of-view. But Samatar's virtuoso flourishes of
form serve a higher purpose: They couch a quietly devastating
account of a woman who gave up her life as a career woman and
mother to become a cyborg, one who, alone, tends to a radioactive
waste facility which she may never leave. While Samatar slowly
unspools her character's reasons for leaving her former life --
delivering a primer on the haunting philosophies and damaged
psyches of the scientists who gave us nuclear power along the way
-- 'Tender' redefines the emotional power and literary heft that
speculative fiction can convey. As does Tender as a whole." --
Jason Heller, NPRI was also impressed with both of the pieces
original to this collection. . . . 'Fallow' is the second original
piece, a novella, and is by far the longest in the collection. It's
also the best novella I've read in quite some time. . . . a heady
mix of science and grim hard-scrabble religious life in a dystopic
and closeknit society. . . . I'd strongly recommend giving the
literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected
here a read. It's as good as I'd hoped, and just as smart too." --
Brit Mandelo, Tor.comTender: Stories includes two excellent new
pieces together with 18 reprints, and one of them, Fallow, is not
only the longest story in the collection, but also her most complex
and accomplished SF story to date. On the basis of her
award-winning debut novel A Stranger in Olondria and its sequel The
Winged Histories, Samatar's reputation has been mostly that of a
fantasist, and her most famous story, ''Selkie Stories Are For
Losers'' (the lead selection here) seemed to confirm that
reputation - although once Samatar establishes the parameters of
her fantastic worlds, she works out both her plot details and
cultural observations with the discipline of a seasoned SF writer
and the psychological insight of a poet." -- Gary K. Wolfe,
LocusThese stories are windows into an impressively deep
imagination guided by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful
mastery of language." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Sofia
Samatar's stories are just so good. Surprising. Suspenseful at an
emotional level -- I kept finding myself plummeted into an emotion
face first, everything built up so steadily, with such subtle and
meticulous storytelling. Samatar earns readers' trust and uses it
to take us into unexpected territory, to make us see ourselves in
our power, in our messiness. Tender is the right word, so many of
these stories touched into the place of gasping, or tears. Each
story had me like, Oh this is my favorite, I must mention this one.
But then I would read the next story which would be Another Whole
Paradigm, similar only in that the writing was astonishing, each
word so precise. This collection is an exquisite exploration of
what otherness and belonging and place and language and love do to
us all. It is visionary fiction. Please accept this as my
enthusiastic recommendation to let this book have its way with
you." -- adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia's BroodEqual
parts brutal and beautiful, flinty, and acrobatic, Samatar's
stories explore lesser known territories of the imagination. The
results chime with all the strangeness of dream and the
dark-hearted truth of fairytale. I loved it." -- Lauren Beukes,
author of The Shining GirlsIf a library came alive, and spent ten
thousand years walking up and down upon the earth, exploring and
dreaming and falling in and out of love, it might write stories
like these." -- Ben Loory, Tales of Flying and FallingThe first
collection from one of fantasy's rising stars, showcasing her rich,
lyrical language and intricate storytelling in 20 short works."--
Publishers Weekly
Praise for Sofia Samatar's Books: "The excerpt from Sofia Samatar's
compelling novel A Stranger in Olondria should be enough to make
you run out and buy the book. Just don't overlook her short 'Selkie
Stories Are for Losers, ' the best story about loss and love and
selkies I've read in years." --K. Tempest Bradford, NPR"An
imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made."
--Hello Beautiful"Pleasantly startling and unexpected. Her prose is
by turns sharp and sumptuous, and always perfectly controlled. . .
. There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something
wilder."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Like an alchemist,
Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences."
--Shelf Awareness (starred review)"Beauty, wonder, and a soaring
paean to the power of story."--Jason Heller, NPR"Highly
recommended." --N. K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review
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