3.5
Tender
ByPublisher Description
Divided into “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” these twenty stories travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality.
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3.5
“finished reading this on the floor just for you elle! I haven’t read a short story collection before, but I had the issue I anticipated where I loveddd some but slogged through others. selkie stories are for losers and tender both 5 stars, and the general sense of longing, grief, and sense of place that ran through these stories was very strong. 3.5”
“This was a beautiful collection, and I know many of these short stories will be lingering with me for a long time. I was impressed by how cohesive the collection is, even though the form and genre of the stories within are quite diverse. So many of these short stories are meta-textual, responding to or recontextualizing other texts, folk tales, histories, which is a realm that I love to play in. Samatar is a real expert at epistolary fiction and other non-traditional forms of storytelling (I will be thinking of Walkdog's high school essay format for a long time).
Themes of colonialism, class, environmental collapse, familial relationships.
Favorites: Selkie Stories Are For Losers, Walkdog, Tender, Fallow, The Red Thread”
“there are no words to express how special this book is to me.
okay, maybe i found a few words. Sofia Samatar’s short story collection Tender became an all-time favorite the moment i started to read. there are some books where you just know—the language, the atmosphere, the energy, the (aptly named) tenderness—it was just perfect for me. this is one of those books that i love inexplicably, making it so hard to describe my obsession, but it’s one that i will hold in my heart forever.
split into two sections, Tender Bodies and Tender Landscapes, these stories are tense and beautiful, ancient and contemporary, fabulist and fantastical, near to life and far from reality. every story in this collection carries an element of fantasy regardless of its time or place. they’re so hard to describe and yet written very accessibly, and i wanted to savor every page. some of my favorite quotes follow below:
“Death is skin-tight, Mona says. Gray in front and gray in back.
Dear Mona: When I look at you, my skin hurts.”
— from Selkie Stories are for Losers
“I want you to tell me that he's not cold. Somebody's always with him. He's got protection. No one will ever hurt him again.”
— from Walkdog
“I think of how bright it was in the bathroom that night, how some kind of loss swept through all of us, electric, and you'd started it, you'd started it by yourself, and we were with you in that hilarious and total rage of loss. Let's lose it. Let's lose everything.”
— from How to Get Back to the Forest
“SO ALONE WISH I WAS DEAD, I once wrote in a notebook, but it wasn't true.
I wished I was alive.”
— from Request for an Extension on the Clarity
“Jacob wrestled the angel by the waters of the brook and said: "I will not let thee go except thou bless me." Temar, I thought, I will not let thee go except thou bless me.”
— from Fallow”
About Sofia Samatar
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
Other books by Sofia Samatar
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