Books by Sofia Samatar
New Release
Opacities
Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces an attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked “upstairs” and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship’s university alongside the elite.
Tone
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.”
The White Mosque
A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity.
Monster Portraits
Monster Portraits investigates the monstrous through words and images. It is also an uncanny autobiography: the record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with memories of a pair of mixed children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two–word and image, brother and sister, extraordinary and everyday, black and white–Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends. These notes and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.
Tender: Stories
Tender collects dispatches from the near future, the alternate present, the fragmentary past, and the most distant stretches of the time to come. Divided into “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” these twenty stories explore the fragility and resilience of bodies, human environments, memory, and love.
The Winged Histories
Four women—a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite—are caught up on different sides of a violent rebellion. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.
A Stranger in Olondria
Jevick, the pepper merchant’s son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick’s life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria’s Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
