After reading The Enormous Egg as a child, I’ve been devoted to stories where the strange, the uncanny, and the magical are all elements of the worlds characters must negotiate. I’m most drawn to fiction containing seemingly unreal elements because, in my experience, that is reality. Those moments when the past suddenly feels present, or when you glimpse something at the edge of your vision that feels significant, but you can’t quite catch it. Moments when anything is possible. No surprise that I write fiction that explores those moments of uncertainty and leaves the reader unmoored, thinking about the people and their experiences long after they’ve left the book.
One of my favorite fiction collections, it contains everything from selkies to homework assignments to imagined histories.
I’m drawn to stories that illuminate hidden literature, imagine landscapes, or unearth a secret history. Stories with footnotes, poems, and epistolaries. Tender is all these things, and in the best fabulist tradition, these elements are not the point. They heighten the stakes and experiences.
I love books where the unreal and uncanny don’t distract from reality but create a focus to make a fictional reality more real. In Tender, even stories that appear to be straight science fiction become something bigger and stranger.
Samatar is a masterful stylist, and her prose is outrageously good.
World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Locus award finalist
Divided into "Tender Bodies" and "Tender Landscapes," the stories collected here in this first collection of short fiction from a rising star travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality. Some of Samatar's weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.
David Mitchell’s most famous novels, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, are incredible works of fabulist fiction, but The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is my favorite. Mitchell’s prose is stunning, and it particularly shines in this novel.
His characters, both European and Japanese, grab the reader immediately and are some of the most human, heartbreaking people I’ve met in a novel. Here, the uncanny, fantastical, and speculative elements are more subtle in telling the story of an unlikely relationship between a Dutchman and a Japanese woman during the height of the Dutch East Indies Company’s influence in the Far East.
But this is more than historical fiction. Something beyond Japan’s 18th-century strict societal mores and De Zoet’s Catholicism moves just out of view. Something mythic yet personal. Fate, gods, ghosts—we are never quite certain which, or maybe it’s all of them.
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
'Brilliant' - The Times 'A masterpiece' - Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two…
I wish publishers translated more fantastical fiction from around the world. This collection by Mexican authors offers a buffet of the weird, fabulist, and otherworldly.
The translated prose is masterful. Many stories draw the distant, decaying realm lying between life and death, directly and viscerally, into the homes and lives of the characters.
Anthologies can often suffer from an unevenness between authors, but this collection is consistently surprising and offers something for any reader of fabulist fiction.
A huge, energetic, and ambitious groundbreaking anthology from emerging and established Mexican authors which showcases all-new supernatural folktales, alien incursions, ghost stories, apocalyptic narratives, and more. Stereotypes of Mexican identities and fictions are identified and transcended. Traditional tales rub shoulders with mindbending new worlds. Welcome to the new Mexican fantastic. Eduardo Jimenez Mayo's translations include books by Bruno Estanol, Rafael Perez Gay, and Jose Maria Perez Gay. Chris N. Brown lives in Austin, Texas. He is a contributor to the blog No Fear of the Future. Bruce Sterling lives in Turin, Italy, and blogs at Wired's Beyond the Beyond.
I love novels that evolve as I read them. I don’t want to feel I know exactly how a book will turn out from the first page. Give me the unknown and the mysterious, a strange setting and an otherworldly tone.
I also love novels with descriptive chapter titles. Piranesi satisfied all those impulses. The story begins by creating a deep, almost mythological atmosphere, which quickly reveals itself to be a mysterious epistolary, perhaps an ancient diary.
The unfolding mystery is intriguing, but the emerging and disturbing relationship between the novel’s two characters is the heart of the book. It drew me in by building a hidden history I could fall into, then slowly layering secrets and discoveries until masterfully revealing a devastating truth.
Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A SUNDAY TIMES & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' NEW YORK MAGAZINE __________________________________ Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.
In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend,…
I’m always impressed by how Karen Russell pulls the reader into her stories with no warning about what we’re getting into. No easing into strange situations. She places her characters in what we publicly claim can’t be real but privately know to be true.
To make a fabulist story work, images must cling to the reader’s mind like golden treacle. Each one either grounding us in the familiar or firmly establishing the unfamiliar as quotidian. Russel is a master at this. Her stories flow so easily, and her characters’ unforgettable voices hit the reader in the first paragraph.
Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to 'Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. . . ); a Minotaur leads his family on the trail out West, and finally, in the collection's poignant and hilarious title story, fifteen girls raised by wolves are painstakingly re-civilised by…
A wayward city, untethered by time or place. If you find yourself caught within its strange power, you are already lost.
All Stina wants is to escape a terrible date and get her VW out of the mud. João wants to return to his regiment fighting for the King of Portugal. Croydon tries to find his way back to his bicycle and his parents. But everyone caught in the unbound city must decide to either stay or leave for an ever-changing often dangerous world outside the city.
Many arrivals accept the city's power, others desire it for their own gain. One seeks to destroy it. But disrupting the city may trigger not just its destruction but the unmaking of the outside world.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
