Praise for Tender:
"Most of the 20 sumptuous tales in Sofia Samatar's collection Tender take place on Earth - although not always the Earth we might recognize. Sprawling in subject from the supernatural power of names to the loneliness of a half-robot woman, Tender redefines the emotional power and literary heft that speculative fiction can convey. Where Samatar's acclaimed fantasy novels exist in a strange, dreamlike world, her short stories daringly explore the overlap of familiarity and otherness." - NPR Best of 2017
"When Tender was published last spring, I had been waiting for a short-story collection from Sofia Samatar for what felt like 10 million years. Samatar is a novelist, poet, scholar, and author of science fiction and fantasy stories, and this book combines previously published award-winning short fiction with two new pieces, a novella and a story, that give life to the breadth and width of her astonishing imagination."- Carmen Maria Machado, The Week
"This is a short story collection containing wonder after wonder, done with casual intensity. These are all sharp knives of stories, and it's definitely possible to think oneself unsliced until the blood starts to pour. I encountered Samatar's short work in 2012, probably, with her short 'Selkie Stories are for Losers, ' and was floored on sight. She's published two novels as well, but the short fiction is my first love. Unlike the rest of the authors on this list, I actually know Sofia, and I'm as moved by her in person as I am by her work. Her wide-ranging and deeply researched interests are fully showcased in her prose, which moves from nonfiction to speculative surrealism, from historical automatons to victims of warfare, all at the same time. There are witch stories, and ripped from the headline stories, stories about longing for other planets, stories about the human condition of pain. They cross all genre divides, and smash them. This collection was edited by Kelly Link, herself a lighthouse of mine, and her work has common ground with Samatar's, just as both of their work has common ground with everything else on this list. These are all authors whose works are sui generis, but who constitute a tribe of writer warriors as far as I'm concerned. Everyone here is an obliterator of tropes and received myth, a reviser of hierarchy, and a deeply skilled storyteller and maker of worlds. I can't even believe I get to live in a time in which writers like the ones on this list exist, let alone get to have their brains feed mine." - Maria Dahvana Headley, Electric Lit
"A wide-ranging collection by an author who is as at home in a contemporary satire as she is in a beautifully atmospheric fable. For readers who love seeing what a master can do with short fiction." - Jenn Northington, Book Riot
"Samatar is a master at not only weaving imaginative tales, but deftly layering them with emotional truths. While some stories are playful, many are sad, and others are disturbing. Many of the stories are suspenseful, not necessarily because of their structures, but from not quite knowing the emotional terrain they'll tackle. And yet it's easy to trust Samatar as she takes you into unfamiliar territory with prose that is skillful, controlled, and lovely." - Rachel León, Chicago Review of Books
"A relentless, challenging, and hypnotic collection, Sofia Samatar's Tender transports the reader to myriad worlds, periods of history, and monstrous futures yet to be born. It can be a difficult text, demanding a high level of engagement with multiple layers and themes. At the same time, its subtle yet wrenching emotions have a way of getting under your skin." - Ilana Teitelbaum, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Tender's longest story is also a science fiction tale set in the future - and like 'The Red Thread, ' it toys wi
