Sofia samatar—a dazzling and vital voice—braids autobiography with philosophy and storytelling folkloric and literary to create vignettes that reveal how Otherness is always present in our art, our histories, our mirrors. Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images.

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. World fantasy award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. 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.

Del samatar’s illustrations of monsters are gorgeous and hauntingly human. Their faces are emotive and their bodies are fantastical and graceful. Sofia samatar’s storytelling never fails to enchant and monster portraits lava-rocks Del Samatar’s stunningly detailed images with the breathless depth of her vision to peek between bushes, into mirrors, and across time through the everyday monstrous grandeur—coy and aggressive, beyond diasporas, best-kept secret and plain as the second nose on a rugged face—often missed by the naked eye.

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. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

Tender: Stories

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. She lives in Virginia. Tempest bradford, poetic, NPRAn imaginative, and dark meditation on how history gets made. Hello beautifulPleasantly startling and unexpected.

There are strains here too of Jane Austen and something wilder. Publishers weekly starred reviewLike an alchemist, Sofia Samatar spins golden landscapes and dazzling sentences. Shelf awareness starred reviewBeauty, wonder, and a soaring paean to the power of story. Jason heller, NPRHighly recommended.

N. She has written for the guardian, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld, among others, and has won the John W. The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards.

. Jemisin, new york times book reviewSofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. Campbell award, the british Fantasy Award, the Crawford Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

The Elementals

The finest writer of paperback originals in America. Stephen king "Surely one of the most terrifying novels ever written. Poppy Z. Something that has terrified Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys and which still haunts their nightmares. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand.

But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Seven other horror classics by Michael McDowell are available from Valancourt Books. Though best known for his screenplays for tim burton's Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, McDowell is now being rediscovered as one of the best modern horror writers and a master of Southern Gothic literature.

A haunted house story unlike any other, michael mcDowell's The Elementals 1981 was one of the finest novels to come out of the horror publishing explosion of the 1970s and '80s. Brite "beyond any trace of doubt, one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country. Peter straub "readers of weak constitution should beware!" - Publishers Weekly "McDowell has a flair for the gruesome.

Washington post after a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Something horrific that may be responsible for several terrible and unexplained deaths years earlier - and is now ready to kill again.

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Horns: A Novel

Joe hill's critically acclaimed, bram stoker Award-winning debut chiller, New York Times bestselling, Heart-Shaped Box, heralded the arrival of new royalty onto the dark fantasy scene. A twisted, was also honored with a bram stoker award—and whose emotionally powerful and macabre work has been praised by the New York Times as, "wild, 20th Century Ghosts, terrifying new novel of psychological and supernatural suspense, mesmerizing, Horns is a devilishly original triumph for the Ray Bradbury Fellowship recipient whose story collection, perversely witty…a Valentine from hell.

". With horns, he polishes his well-deserved crown.

Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples

From the hugo, locus, bram stoker, nebula award-winning, world Fantasy, and New York Times bestselling writer Neil Gaiman American Gods comes this graphic novel adaptation by Colleen Doran Troll Bridge! . A chilling fantasy retelling of the snow white fairy tale by new York Times bestselling creators Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran!A not-so-evil queen is terrified of her monstrous stepdaughter and determined to repel this creature and save her kingdom from a world where happy endings aren't so happily ever after.

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Hoshi and the Red City Circuit

Things get complicated when one of the victims turns out to be Hoshi's ex-girlfriend, and power-hungry bureaucrats and old rivals stir up new problems. To unwind the plot to take over the city, Hoshi must decipher a deadly computer program and learn to communicate with the alien, before it's too late for the next victim—and the city.

Due to their unique neurology, only the enslaved Operator caste can program the quantum computers that run 26th century Red City. An immortal, amoral alien may even be involved. When three of the caste are ritually murdered, it's up to private investigator Hoshi Archer—herself a recently liberated Operator—to help the police solve the case.

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The Winged Histories: a novel

Four women a soldier, a poet, a scholar, and a socialite are caught up on opposing sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their loyalties and agendas and ideologies come into conflict, the four fear their lives may pass unrecorded. She also received the John W. Campbell Award. She has written for the Guardian, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and many other publications.

The winged histories is the saga of an empire and a family: their friendships, their enduring love, their arcane and deadly secrets. Samatar asks who makes history, who endures it, and how the turbulence of historical change sweeps over every aspect of a life and over everyone, no matter whether or not they choose to seek it out.

Sofia samatar is the author of the Crawford, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history. Here is the much-anticipated companion novel to Sofia Samatar’s World Fantasy Award-winning debut, A Stranger in Olondria.

Her website is sofiasamatar. Com. She is working on a collection of stories.

A Stranger in Olondria: a novel

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. In desperation, jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults.

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. Martin and Joe Hill. 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.

Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading. A stranger in olondria is a skillful and immersive debut fantasy novel that pulls the reader in deeper and deeper with twists and turns reminiscent of George R.

R.

Bodyminds Reimagined: Disability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction

Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. Jemisin, and nalo hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, Shawntelle Madison, calling into question the very nature of identity.

In these texts, as well as in butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. In bodyminds reimagined sami schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and disability.

She reads disability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry Stigmata not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. K. The fantasy worlds in works by N. Outlining disability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

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Einstein Intersection

A nonhuman race reimagines human mythology.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror

Unfalteringly faithful to its beloved source material, alarming emotional complexities at play in the stories we tell ourselves, and frequently, and each other, The Merry Spinster also illuminates the unsuspected, as we tuck ourselves in for the night. From mallory ortberg comes a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on classic fairy tales.

The feature has become among the most popular on the site, with each entry bringing in tens of thousands of views, as the stories proved a perfect vehicle for Ortberg’s eye for deconstruction and destabilization. Bed time will never be the same. Readers of the toast will instantly recognize ortberg's boisterous good humor and uber-nerd swagger: those new to Ortberg's oeuvre will delight in this collection's unique spin on fiction, where something a bit mischievous and unsettling is always at work just beneath the surface.

Sinister and inviting, the merry spinster updates traditional children's stories and fairy tales with elements of psychological horror, emotional clarity, familiar and alien all at the same time, and a keen sense of feminist mischief. Adapted from the beloved "children's stories made horrific" series, "The Merry Spinster" takes up the trademark wit that endeared Ortberg to readers of both The Toast and the best-selling debut Texts From Jane Eyre.

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