Sofia Samatar

After his father's death, Jevick travels to Olondria, the distant land he has only read about in books and has longed to visit, and finds himself enchanted by the exotic land and haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl, Jissavet.

A Novel

A Stranger in Olondria

Using the sword, pen, body, and voice, four women confront a rebellion and the older, stranger threat behind it.

The Winged Histories

These twenty stories travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality.

Stories

Tender

Fiction. Art. Hybrid Genre. Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, MONSTER PORTRAITS investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two--texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday--MONSTER PORTRAITS multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts. Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

Monster Portraits

A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years. In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America. A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

A Memoir

The White Mosque

Hannu Rajaniemi

Usman T. Malik

Maria Dahvana Headley

Brooke Bolander

Eugene Fisher

Ben Loory

Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Carmen Maria Machado

Talented, diverse, and bold - the new voices of fantasy are breaking all of the rules.

The New Voices of Fantasy

Ken Liu

Annalee Newitz

Tochi Onyebuchi

Peter Watts

Alastair Reynolds

John Chu

Sarah Pinsker

Rich Larson

Daryl Gregory

Suzanne Palmer

Vina Jie-Min Prasad

Ian R. Macleod

Peter F Hamilton

Saad Z Hossain

A cutting-edge anthology, published on the 100th anniversary of the word “Robot”, exploring the impact it has had on the world, the possibilities and place of robots in society going forwards. 100 years after Karel Capek coined the word, “robots” are an everyday idea, and the inspiration for countless stories in books, film, TV and games. They are often among the least privileged, most unfairly used of us, and the more robots are like humans, the more interesting they become. This collection of stories is where robots stand in for us, where both we and they are disadvantaged, and where hope and optimism shines through. Including stories by: Brooke Bolander · John Chu · Daryl Gregory · Peter F. Hamilton · Saad Z. Hossain · Rich Larson · Ken Liu · Ian R. Macleod · Annalee Newitz · Tochi Onyebuchi · Suzanne Palmer · Sarah Pinsker · Vina Jie-Min Prasad · Alastair Reynolds · Sofia Samatar · Peter Watts

Robots and Revolution

Made To Order

Neil Gaiman

Laird Barron

Indrapramit Das

Catherynne M. Valente

Kij Johnson

Rachel Swirsky

Kaaron Warren

Nathan Ballingrud

Gemma Files

Joe Lansdale

Chinelo Onwualu

Through the work of twenty-six writers, emerging to award-winning, The Humanity of Monsters plumbs the depths of humane monsters, monstrous humans, and the interstices between. In stories by turns surreal, sublime, brutal, and haunting, there are no easy answers to be found. Featuring Nathan Ballingrud, Laird Barron, Polenth Blake, Leah Bobet, Indrapramit Das, Berit Ellingsen, Gemma Files, Neil Gaiman, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kij Johnson, Joe R. Lansdale, Yoon Ha Lee, Rose Lemberg, Livia Llewellyn, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Meghan McCarron, Sunny Moraine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Chinelo Onwualu, Sofia Samatar, Rachel Swirsky, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente, Kaaron Warren, Peter Watts, and A.C. Wise.

The Humanity of Monsters

Four women, soldier, scholar, poet, and socialite are caught up on different sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their families are torn apart, they fear they may disappear into the unwritten pages of history. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history. Praise for The Winged Histories: "Like an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences.... a fantasy novel for those who take their sentences with the same slow, unfolding beauty as a cup of jasmine tea, and for adventurers like Tav, who are willing to charge ahead into the unknown.”--Shelf Awareness (starred review) "A highly recommended indulgence.” --N.K. Jemisin, New York Times Book Review "Above all, it’s a story about love--the terrible love that tears lives apart. Doomed love; impossible love; love that requires a rewriting of the rules, be it for a country, a person, or a story.”--Jenn Northington, Tor.com "An imaginative, poetic, and dark meditation on how history gets made.” --Hello Beautiful Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories and a collection, Tender: Stories. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, New Inquiry, Believer, 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 and her website is sofiasamatar.com.

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeffrey Thomas

Jeffrey Ford

Chen Qiufan

Paul Tremblay

Michael Blumlein

John Langan

Karin Tidbeck

Joseph S. Pulver Sr.

A.C Wise

Richard Gavin

John R. Fultz

Anne-Sylvie Salzman

Livia Llewellyn

Anna Taborska

Scott Nicolay

Damien Angelica Walters

Kristie DeMeester

Simon Stranzas

W.H. Pugmire

Welcome to the weird! Acclaimed author and editor Laird Barron, one of weird fiction's brightest exponents, brings his expert eye and editorial sense to the inaugural volume of the Year's Best Weird Fiction. No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outré. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres. Hence, in this initial showcase of weird fiction you will discover tales of horror, fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and the macabre. Contributing authors include Jeffrey Ford, Sofia Samatar, Joseph S. Pulver Sr, John Langan, Richard Gavin, and W. H. Pugmire.

Year's Best Weird Fiction

Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir (Midland Authors Book Award) Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years. In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America. A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

Kate Zambreno

Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.” In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a single author, and should be approached through a communal practice. In partnership, the Committee explores the atmospheres emanating from texts by Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Heike Geissler, Hiroko Oyamada, Mieko Kanai, Bhanu Kapil, Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman, and others, attending to the chafing of political irritation, the hunger of precarious and temporary work, and the lonely delights of urban and suburban walks. This study treats a variety of questions: How is tone filtered through translation? Can a text hold the feelings that pass between humans and animals? What can attention to literary tone reveal about shared spaces such as factories, universities, and streets and the clashes and connections that happen there? Searching and conversational, Tone seeks immersion in literary affect to convey the experience of reading—and living—together.

Tone

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

Nalo Hopkinson

Paul Cornell

Kat Howard

Jennifer Marie Brissett

Alex Bledsoe

November/December 2016

Uncanny Magazine Issue 13

The Miracle of the One Hundred Radishes

Charles Yu

Seanan McGuire

John Adams

Theodora Goss

Adam-Troy Castro

Sam Miller

Lightspeed Magazine

Maria Headley

Carrie Vaughn

Charlie Anders

A. Merc Rustad

In the pages of Lightspeed Magazine, you will find the finest science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF-and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.Issue #1 was launched in June 2010, and now eight years later, we've reached a milestone: Issue 100. To celebrate, we decided to publish a super-sized issue, with ten original stories-more than twice the amount of original fiction than usual-plus ten reprints and some special nonfiction to boot. And to make things even more commemorative, the vast majority of our fiction in this issue, both original and reprint, comes from our most frequently published fiction contributors-the Lightspeediest writers to ever Lightspeed. It's a distillation of what we're made of, and we're beyond excited to share it with all of you.Featuring work by Vylar Kaftan, Carrie Vaughn, Adam-Troy Castro, A. Merc Rustad, Ken Liu, Sofia Samatar, Charles Yu, Caroline M. Yoachim, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, David Barr Kirtley, Genevieve Valentine, Cadwell Turnbull, Yoon Ha Lee, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sam J. Miller, Kat Howard, Theodora Goss, Charlie Jane Anders, Jeremiah Tolbert, and more.

Lightspeed Magazine, September 2018

Mary Ruefle

Hollis Seamon

John Crowley

Jim Shepard

Paul Di Filippo

Akiko Busch

John Seven

Sonia Sanchez

Karin Lowachee

Paul Park

Sarena Ulibarri

Gregory Scheckler

Izzy Wasserstein

Renee Simms

Safia Elhillo

Simone Muench

Tina Connolly

Jorie Graham

Kirsten Imani Kasai

Sara St. Antoine

Karen Shepard

Unoma Azuah

Andrea Martinez Corbin

Shawn Frazier

Christine Poreba

Jennifer Rapaport

Erin Roberts

Marjorie Thomsen

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers

Then Again

Sare St. Antoine

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors -- compared to the larger THEN AGAIN featuring over thirty authors, THEN AGAIN Remix is a smaller edition containing works by ten authors.

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Ten Writers

Then Again (Remix)

Neil Clarke

The August 2012 issue of the Hugo Award-winning magazine, Clarkesworld. This issue features the following stories: "Mantis Wives" by Kij Johnson, "Honey Bear" by Sofia Samatar and "Fade to White" by Catherynne M. Valente. Non-fiction includes an interview with China Mieville, an article on magic systems and real world zeitgeists by Jeff Seymour, an Another Word column by Daniel Abraham and editorial by Neil Clarke.

Clarkesworld

Sofia Samatar

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