Tone is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of “I know it when I see it.”In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience rather than a sing...

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 wh...

LIGHTSPEED is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF--and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.Usually, artwork is commissioned to illustrate a story, but we're turning things on their heads! Our cover this month is from the multi-award-winning artist Julie Dillon...

An incredibly unique comic book benefit project featuring comic shorts, pin-ups, short essays, and flash fiction, the proceeds of which will be going to the Innocence ProjectWe’ve all seen the pictures: a six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted by U.S. marshals on her first day at an all-white, New Orleans school in 1960; a police dog attacking a demonstrator in Birmingham; fire hoses turned on protesters; Martin Luther King Jr. addressing a crowd on the National Mall. These pictu...

LIGHTSPEED #1 was launched in June 2010, and now eight years later, we've reached a milestone: Issue 100. To celebrate, we're publishing a super-sized issue, with ten original stories--more than twice the amount of original fiction than usual--plus ten reprints and some special nonfiction to boot. And to make things even more commemorative, the vast majority of our fiction in this issue, both original and reprint, comes from our most frequently published fiction contributors—the LIGHTSPEED...

Huge immersive fantasy novel that will shock and pull readers in.First novel by a unique new voice.Publicity starting in Madison, WI, on WPR and growing from there.Online pre-publication ad campaign to build awareness.

Four women - a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite - are caught up on opposing sides of a violent rebellion. As war erupts and their loyalties and agendas and ideologies come into conflict, the four fear their lives may pass unrecorded. Using the sword and the pen, the body and the voice, they struggle not just to survive, but to make history.Here is the much-anticipated companion novel to Sofia Samatar’s World Fantasy Award-winning debut, A Stranger in Olondria. The Wi...

Nebula Award Finalist for Best NovellaNamed a Best Sci-Fi Book of 2024 by Esquire, The New York Times, SLATE, The Washington Post, and ELLE“I am in love with Sofia Samatar's lyricism and the haunting beauty of her imagination. Her stories linger, like the memory of a sumptuous feast.”—N. K. JemisinA Most Anticipated in 2024 Pick for Goodreads | LitHub | Book Riot | She...

First collection from writer who is taking off.First novel won many prizes, second novel nominated for same. Stories finalists for many awards.Writer who crosses borders and catches interest of many differenent constituencies.Stories reprinted in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy StoriesIncludes a huge new story, “Fallow,” published here for the first time.Author has been a repeat guest on To the Best of Our Knowledge.Author has writ...

Celebrated author Sofia Samatar presents a mystical, revolutionary space adventure for the exhausted dreamer in this brilliant science fiction novella tackling the carceral state and violence embedded in the ivory tower while embodying the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin.The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels of a mining ship out among the stars. His whole world changes—literally—when he is yanked "upstairs" and informed he has been g...

**Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismOpacities 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 ...

LIGHTSPEED is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF--and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.This month, we have original science fiction by Sofia Samatar ("How to Get Back to the Forest") and Chen Qiufan ("The Mao Ghost," translated by Ken Liu), along with an S...