Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life

Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 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 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 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 douard 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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"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." —Leland Cheuk, The Boston Globe

"Samatar’s book is loose, elegant, opaque as the title suggests; it’s also precise and vivid . . . It made me feel like there are other ways, ways I’ve never thought of or seen, to engage with and think about and make art." —Molly Templeton, Reactor

"Samatar set out to write a book about writing that feels like writing. The result is an intimate fabric of the writer’s daily life, exploring these questions of identity and biography by turning to authors past and present . . . Samatar has crafted a monument to a stalwart creative friendship, a loving homage to her influences, and most of all a book that every writer should read." —Abigail Oswald, Write or Die Magazine

"Opacities, with such elegant sentences and sentiments that you find yourself immediately wanting to return to it, leads you outside itself, since it is, mainly, a book of conversation and of connection . . . Certainly Opacities will offer different things to different readers than the ones it offered me. It will offer me different things the next time I read it." —Liz Harmer, Englewood Review of Books

"A tonic . . . Sofia Samatar writes of freedom. Opacities is a notebook of the endless text, a deathbed confession that stands up and speaks." —Jessica Ferri, The Womb House Books Review

"A generous book filled with perhaps more poetic grace than we deserve . . . An impassioned exploration on the experience and practice of writing, which, for me, served as a much-needed reminder of how writing and reading connects us to a mysterious joy. One that is cause for celebration." —Liska Jacobs, Literary Hub

"Sofia Samatar’s books often blend and explode genre in the most delicious ways, and her newest is no exception." —Laura Sackton, Book Riot

"While reading Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, I experienced a profound sense of recognition. Many of us who wish to exist in the world as writers feel coerced into the kind of visibility that threatens to make us illegible as thinkers and makers . . . Collapsing contrasts between porosity and imperviousness, between intimacy and reserve, and between longing and refusal, Opacities is a portal into a more expansive way of thinking about 'the writerly ecstasy, caught and passed on like an electric charge.'" —Kristen Millares Young, The Rumpus

"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

"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

"In the profound company of others and in conversations with ghosts, Opacities is a work of great intimacy and intelligence. It is both mesmerizing and consoling to dwell in the meditative space Sofia Samatar has created. Her submerged narratives haunt (now coming to the surface, now subsiding) allowing room for the reader to enter the text in any number of ways. A most irresistible experience." —Carole Maso, author of AVA and Mother & Child

“Was ever a darkness so refulgent as Sofia Samatar’s Opacities? With her distinctively supple line, Samatar summons a troupe of literary night-guides from Kafka to Djebar and leads us to the so-called vanishing point where scarcity inverts to fullness and nothing vanishes except our certainties. Obsidian, inky, rippling, Vantablack, Samatar’s vision of literature restores the dream of the night library, where we can and should read in the dark, and where the Future rises up with the face of the New Moon—her next and original face.” —Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral

"Opacities fantasizes many models of writing, including the 'companion text,' the project that 'lasts your whole life,' the one that includes failure and 'deep aimlessness,' and the book that writes itself, by virtue of an accumulation of index cards in a shoebox. Opacities dreams of connectivity and communion. It strives to bring into correspondence the talismanic writers of the literary imaginary, and, in a voice reminiscent of the address in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Samatar conjures an anonymous, epistolary intimate. It is a book about process and ambivalence, one that ultimately evinces a deep-seated passion for the creative acts that are reading and writing." —Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards

"What is a writing method that 'is less like writing and more like living?' Sofia Samatar develops this question as a form of metallurgy in Opacities, a book that sets autobiography in motion until what remains is what we love the most: a notebook. Blurry, snorting and stamping its hoof in the rain, the notebook's hybridity is both void and animal: 'Zero. Zero.' To write this bifurcated or doubled zero, Samatar thinks 'through the hole.' This is an 'incompleteness' taken to 'extremes,' and I'm here for it. Anything I could possibly write in support of this beautiful book falls short of the elation I felt when reading, something that happened in one sitting because I could not set it down." —Bhanu Kapil