Monster Portraits (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781941628102)

Fiction. Art. Hybrid Genre. Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, MONSTER PORTRAITS investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two--texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday--MONSTER PORTRAITS multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.

Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

Author: Sofia Samatar
ISBN-10: 1941628109
ISBN-13: 9781941628102
Publisher: Rose Metal Press
Language: English
Published: 02/22/2018
Pages: 84
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.90w x 0.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/05/2018