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Widely acclaimed as a novelist, here Nicola Griffith displays her power, precision, and clarity of thought in multiple modes and forms.Known for her gorgeously supple prose that soars effortlessly over genre boundaries, Griffith is also an incisive essayist whose ground-breaking, data-driven work on gender bias in the literary ecosystem sparked self-searching conversations worldwide. In this heady mélange of essays, poems, art, and stories—some seen here for the first time—the author makes foundational assertions about love versus ownership (“Wife”), advocates for the writer as explorer (“Branding: It Burns”), and points out the gaping hole in our literary landscape where we’d expect to find disability fiction (“Overwriting the Old Story”). These and other public-facing essays are followed by four powerfully intimate poems. Returning to prose, Griffith immerses us so seamlessly in her viscerally imagined fiction that we feel how it is to be hurled like light through the stars in “Glimmer,” hunted through the urban alleys of “Cold Wind” during a holiday blizzard, swept along irresistible currents of “Down the Path of the Sun,” and, in “Many Things in Dumnet,” a novella published here for the first time, brought ashore as a stranger to land where something is very wrong.
Finally, “Otherwise Unremarkable,” series editor Nisi Shawl's interview with the author, teases out sometimes startling and always satisfying answers to questions on power, activism, immigration, cognitive poetics, and art.
About the author
Nicola Griffith is the winner of the Otherwise (formerly the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial) Award, Lambda Literary, Premio Italia, Nebula, Washington State Book Award, Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize,
Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and World Fantasy Award. Recent titles include
Hild and
Menewood, both from FSG;
Spear from Tordotcom; and the crime thrillers
The Blue Place,
Stay, and
Always, reissued by Picador. In 2024 she was inducted to the SFF Hall of Fame. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
