![]() ![]() ![]() Once upon a time, the story goes, some young men discovered an element. Samatar’s stories are always doing multiple things at once, and this persistent multiplicity is perhaps best articulated in the following passages from the title story, “Tender”: Scholarship itself is a foremost element in Tender, a collection spanning five years of short fiction: the narrators often have an intimate relationship with writing, stories, books, or correspondence. Because the stories are so layered with ideas, a close reading can be an intensely cerebral experience to skim the surface is to miss the story. Motifs of displacement, colonialism, and mythology are prevalent throughout. To her fiction, Samatar brings an academic background in African and Arabic languages and literature. In the year Olondria was released, it won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Crawford Award. Similarly, she uses diverse genre elements - drawing upon science fiction, myth, and the fantastic - as a means to explore ideas and offer deeper layers of stylistic intricacy. One has only to page through any of her works to see why: with prose that functions on multiple levels at once atop stories that do the same, Samatar’s fiction embodies a beauty and complexity reminiscent of Ursula K. ![]() THOUGH RELATIVELY NEW to fiction - her first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, was published in 2013 - Sofia Samatar already stands as a formidable literary force. ![]()
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