Search results for ""Author Sofia Samatar""

Named a Best Sci-Fi Book of 2024 by EsquireI am in love with Sofia Samatar''s lyricism and the haunting beauty of her imagination. Her stories linger, like the memory of a sumptuous feast.N. K. JemisinA Most Anticipated in 2024 Pick for Goodreads LitHub Book Riot She Reads The Nerd Daily New ScientistCelebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.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 changesliterallywhen he is yanked upstairs and informed he has been given an opportunity to be educated at the ship's university alongside the elite.Overwhelmed and alone, the b

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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.

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Shortlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of The Year A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year A rich history of wanderers, exiles and intruders. A haunting personal journey through Central Asia. An intimate reflection on mixed identity shaped by cultural crossings. In the late 1800s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites fled Russia for Muslim Central Asia, to await Christ’s return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar traces their gruelling journey across desert and mountains, and its improbable fruit: a small Christian settlement inside the Khanate of Khiva. Named ‘The White Mosque’ after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village—a community of peace, prophecy, music and martyrs—lasted fifty years. Within this curious tale, Sofia discovers a tapestry of characters connected by the ancient Silk Road: a fifteenth-century astronomer-king; an intrepid Swiss woman traveller; the first Uzbek photographer; a free spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, in a voice both warm and wise, she explores her own complex upbringing as an American Mennonite of colour, the daughter of a Swiss-American Christian and a Somali Muslim. On this pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, Samatar traces the porous borders of identity and narrative. When you leave your tribe, what remains? How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of life’s buried archives and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

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In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Edouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written? Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.

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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.

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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.

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