Forget the Sleepless Shores: Stories

by Sonya Taaffe

Overview

In Forget the Sleepless Shores, readers should expect to be captivated by many ghosts and spirits who inhabit brine, some from tears of heartache and loss, some from strange bodies of water, not necessarily found on the map but discovered through charting a course through the perilous straits of author Taaffe's imagination, which is eerie and queer (by every definition of the word).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590212103
Publisher:	Lethe Press
Publication date:	08/07/2018
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.66(d)

Editorial Reviews

08/20/2018
The magical realism of poet and fantasist Taaffe’s luscious, melancholy, and literary second collection of stories (after 2005’s Singing Innocence and Experience) drowns the reader in watery imagery and complex sensory landscapes while exploring the theme of mundane relationships transformed by the intrusion of the mystical and uncanny. In the heartbreaking “Chez Vous Soon,” a woman devastated by her failure to keep her lover from fatally succumbing to insanity and artistic obsession encounters his embodied muse. “The Dybbuk in Love” leans heavily into nostalgia and Jewish heritage as a century-old ghost disturbingly inhabits the minds of a suburban woman’s partners to entreat her to accept him as her beloved. “All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts” gracefully takes on the logical legacy of the Lovecraftian mythos with a deep empathy for those called to the sea but still connected to the human world. Though most of Taaffe’s stories hit their unsettling emotional mark when encountered individually, her style falls into common patterns and her prose into lulling rhythms, so that readers who indulge in the entire collection at once may lose subtle distinctions and find themselves overwhelmed by a uniform sad strangeness. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Sonya Taaffe is possessed of a singular and brilliant voice, one I have admired (and envied) since I first read her work more than a decade ago. Few living authors have brought to the task of building fantasy and science fiction her keen eye for the intricacies of the sublime and the terrible, the erotic and the weird. Fewer still have approached this work with such an undeniable talent. It is not an exaggeration to say she takes my breath away, like a plunge into deep, cold waters." - Caitlín R. Kiernan, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award-winning author

"Conscience stalks Oppenheimer as a golem of nuclear glass; passion is laid bare beneath a peat bog; fall and fire claim their own. A girl is moth-light to a throng of ghosts. The sea calls endlessly imperative. The water chooses whom to drown. In Sonya Taaffe's vivid cinema of metamorphoses, the elements themselves have eyes. Watch now and wonder." - Greer Gilman, World Fantasy and James Tiptree Jr. Award-winning author

"Drowns the reader in watery imagery and complex sensory landscapes while exploring the theme of mundane relationships transformed by the intrusion of the mystical and uncanny." - Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher