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On Writing and the Writing Life
by Sofia Samatar
Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing.
In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.
In so doing, Samatar addresses a number of questions about the writing life: Why does publishing feel like the opposite of writing? How can a Black woman navigate interviews and writing conferences without being reduced to a symbol? Are writers located in their biographies or in their texts? And above all, how can the next book be written?
Blurring the line between author and character and between correspondence and literary criticism, Opacities delivers a personal, contemplative exploration of writing where it lives, among impassioned conversations and the work of beloved writers.
"This formally inventive book is a pleasure to read. The author's confessional tone, tightly efficient sentences, and use of white space produce a stunning aesthetic ... [A] beautifully written meditation on the writing life." —Kirkus Reviews
"Samatar succeeds perhaps too well in her "project of deep aimlessness," stringing together gnomic pronouncements about writing that fail to cohere ("So writing will be a body and a dwelling. Box with aperture. Edged and moving"). This falls flat." —Publishers Weekly
"A wide-ranging, epistolary collection on writing, identity and friendship ... A unique exploration of craft and authenticity, Opacities offers its wisdom through these perennial questions and answers." —Literary Hub
"A writing book that's ruthlessly honest about the problematic questions that arise when you become a voice for your community ... Deeply researched and razor-sharp." —The Boston Globe
"Sofia Samatar's Opacities is simply one of the most beautiful books about writing, about being a writer, that I've ever read." —Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy
"Sofia Samatar's Opacities lowers us into the deepest part of the sentence, past ruin, past the drowned, past the moon, past the future, past the writer and her ink where the ragged dark begins to sing. Opacities is a posthumous book written by the living. I read this entire book in the pitch-black to keep all its brilliant secrets safe." —Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
"Opacities is a writer's notebook that we get to read pre-posthumously, a conversation with the self and the dead, a gesture toward the fantasy of publication without publicity. A book for Rilke's 'narrow ledge,' full of intimacy and intensity, comforts and agitations, the haunting desires of artists." —Elisa Gabbert, author of Normal Distance and Any Person Is the Only Self
This information about Opacities was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sofia Samatar is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award Finalist. Her works range from the World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria to Tone, a study of literary tone with Kate Zambreno. Samatar lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
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