Winner of the Illustration Contest

 

Ani Koontz (sister of the cover artist!) is the winner of the illustration contest. 

Review of The Witch's Journey in The Citizen

 

Nice review of The Witch's Journey in The Citizen, Harrisonburg's online news source.

"I trust Mira to grow in using her magical powers for good because she is kind to the core ... It's a joy to trace the journey of a protagonist who honors the humanity of people."

The Witch's Journey – Goodreads Giveway!

My publisher and I are doing a Goodreads Giveaway for The Witch's Journey. Ten signed copies are up for grabs. You can enter the Giveaway here.

 

The Witch's Journey

My fourth novel, The Witch's Journey, comes out today. It is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other booksellers.

As encouragement to buy the novel, I am doing a little promotional activity. All you have to do is send me a photo of yourself holding the book. At the end of September, I'll place all the names in a hat. The winner will receive an original illustration from the book, signed on the back.

For those in the Harrisonburg area, I will be signing books at Parentheses Books on Saturday, September 27, from 10 a.m. to noon.

The Witch's Journey Cover Reveal

 

This is the cover of my next novel, The Witch’s Journey. The painting is by Simon Koontz. The book will come out on August 28, 2025, from Elsewhen Press.

“A book to savor as you would fine chocolate: rich, dark, dreamlike, familiar as a fairytale, sweet as sin. I adored it.” —Alix E. Harrow, Hugo Award–winning author of The Once and Future Witches

“Such a special story; the kind that steps into your dreams then wakes you with the taste of chocolate on your lips as a shadow in the corner walks away, and you are left remembering a place you’ve read about and a witch you suspect knows you’ve been there, and it all feels like the most delicious secret. I loved this book!” —Mary Rickert, World Fantasy Award–winning author of The Memory Garden

“This is rich and delicious magic for the bravest of readers.” —William Alexander, National Book Award–winning author of Goblin Secrets

The Flowers of Evil

I have put out a new translation of Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil. Here are three of my favorites.

Evening Harmony

Now comes the time when, trembling on its stem,
Every flower fumes like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air:
Melancholy waltz, languid vertigo!

Every flower fumes like a censer;

The violin trembles like a tormented heart:

Melancholy waltz, languid vertigo!

The sky is sad and lovely, a vast altar.

The violin trembles like a tormented heart,

A tender heart that loathes the black void!

The sky is sad and lovely, a vast altar;

The sun has drowned in its congealing blood.

A tender heart that loathes the black void

Gathers every vestige of the luminous past!

The sun has drowned in its congealing blood . . .

Your memory in me glows like communion.

The Giantess

In those times when Nature with her powerful spirit

Was giving birth daily to monstrous children,

I would have liked to live beside a young giantess

Like a lazy cat at the feet of a queen.

I'd have liked to watch her body blossom in tandem with her soul

And grow unfettered in her terrifying frolics;

To know by the damp mists floating in her eyes

If her heart harbored a smoldering flame;

To explore at my leisure her magnificent form,

Climbing the slopes of her enormous knees;

And sometimes in summer, when the scorching sun

Forced her to stretch out across the countryside,

To sleep without a care in the shadow of her breasts,

Like a peaceful town at the foot of a mountain.

Autumn Song

I.

Soon we'll plunge into the chilly darkness;

Farewell, clear brightness of too-short summers!

Already I hear the dreary drumbeat

Of firewood clattering on the cobbles of the courtyard.

All of winter will enter my being—fury,

Fear, hatred, horror, terrible forced labor—

And, like the sun in its polar hell,

My heart will be nothing but an icy red block.

Each toppling log sends a shudder through me;

The raising of a gallows wouldn't sound as grim.

My spirit is like a tower that succumbs

To the heavy blows of a tireless battering ram.

Rocked by these monotonous blows, I feel

That somewhere they're hastily nailing a coffin shut.

For whom? —Yesterday it was summer; this is autumn!

The mysterious noise rings like farewell.

II.

I love the green light in your long eyes,

Sweet beauty, but today all is bitter to me,

And nothing, not your love, your boudoir, or your hearth,

Is worth the sun shining on the sea.

But love me, gentle heart! Be a mother

Even for an evil and ungrateful man;

Lover or sister, be the fleeting sweetness

Of a glorious autumn or a setting sun.

Brief task! The tomb awaits; it's famished!

Ah, with my head in your lap, let me

Savor the last sweet amber rays of autumn

While I mourn the white heat of summer!

Opacities

Sofia's new book, Opacities, is out today from Soft Skull. This reads like a companion volume to Tone, which was written with her friend Kate Zambreno, and indeed much of the book is written like a missive to Kate. It's a collection of musings on writing in the digital age and as a representative of "diversity," but it also gathers stories and quotes from her favorite writers, including Clarice Lispector, Samuel R. Delany, Bhanu Kapil, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Rilke. The book is deeply felt, with a fragmentary, crystalline texture that infects the mind long after you lay it aside.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

 

Sofia's novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is now out from Tor. At some level, it is her response to the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as to her experiences as a university student and professor. It imagines a future in which humanity, having rendered Earth uninhabitable, is drifting through space in a fleet of spaceships, searching for asteroids to mine. Our current societal stratification is still present, and a section of the population is incarcerated. The story follows a boy who is plucked from the chained to join the academic elite and his mentor, a professor whose father had been one of the chained. It's a wonderful feat of world-building.

Tone

 

Sofia's latest book is now available from Columbia University Press. This is an unusual collaboration with her friend Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl and Drift, among many others. It is written in a choral first-person plural voice: the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere. The book had its genesis in their email conversations, as they were trying to nail down where tone exists in literature and how it might be defined. Sofia and Kate are both extraordinarily widely read, and one of the pleasures of the book is the vast array of writers they reference, including Nella Larsen, W. G. Sebald, Hiroko Oyamada, Bhanu Kapil, Renee Gladman, and Franz Kafka. The book itself, partly because of its unique voice, creates its own tone, at once erudite and chatty, pensive and expansive.

The White Mosque

 

Sofia's new book, The White Mosque, comes out today. This is a significant departure from her speculative fiction, blending travel writing, memoir, and history. The book emerges from a crazy passage in Mennonite history. In the 1880s, a preacher named Claas Epp decided that Christ was going to return somewhere in central Asia. So he led a group of followers on a two-year journey from what is now Ukraine to what is now Uzbekistan. Many died along the way, but the survivors found hospitality and kindness in the khanate of Khiva, where they established a small community. 

Sofia went on a Mennonite-led tour of Uzbekistan in 2016, and she uses that expedition to structure the book. Along the way, she reflects on her own identity as the daughter of a Swiss Mennonite and Somali Muslim. This is a book of layers and moments, always compelling, always gorgeous. I think you should buy it.

"The Last Djinn"

© 2011 by Mysha Islam 

I have a new story, "The Last Djinn," in the latest issue of the Journal of Mennonite Writing.

Monster Portraits

Sofia and her brother, Del, have created a book entitled Monster Portraits, now out from Rose Metal Press. For as long as I've known him, Del has drawn hybrid creatures of one kind or another, and in my mind's eye he's always curled on a sofa with his battered black sketchbook. For this work, Sofia riffed off of images Del created, using the persona of an investigating journalist to explore the concept of monsters. The pieces feel like prose poems, and are both personal and resonant, gathering notions of monsters from multiple writers.

The book has already received stellar reviews from the New York Times ("Reading this was like wandering out of a dream and into an awareness of something with claws sitting on my chest") and the Chicago Review of Books, and starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist.

Tender

Sofia's collection of short stories, Tender, is now out. It includes most of her published stories, including the Hugo and Nebula nominated "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" and the widely published "Honey Bear," "How to Get Back to the Forest," and "Ogres of East Africa." There are also two new stories, "An Account of the Land of Witches" and the excellent novella-length "Fallow," which is about Anabaptists in space. The book is available in hardcover and as an ebook.

The Sins of Angels Goodreads Giveaway!

My publisher, PS Publishing, is doing a Goodreads Giveaway for The Sins of Angels. Ten signed hardcovers are up for grabs.

Lithium Jesus

My friend Charles Monroe-Kane has published a memoir, Lithium Jesus, with the University of Wisconsin Press. Chuck and I were roommates our first year at Goshen College in 1987. We were an odd pair: I hadn't spent much time outside of East Africa and Chuck came from a poor Ohio family. Somehow, though, we hit it off and have remained friends for nearly thirty years.

This book tells the story of Chuck's struggle with mental illness, and his attempts to come to peace with himself via religion, drugs, sex, and other escapades. It's highly entertaining, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. If you're paying attention, you might spot me flicker on and off the page at one point. I suggest you buy the book.

The Sins of Angels Ebook

The Sins of Angels is now available as an ebook from Amazon. The signed and unsigned hardcovers are still available from the PS Publishing website.

The Sins of Angels

My third novel, The Sins of Angels, is now available for preorder from PS Publishing. It’s a noirish paranormal thriller set in Cairo and the Western Desert, about a couple of hapless detectives who stumble upon a fallen angel. At this point, it’s available in a limited edition of one hundred signed hardbacks, and as an unsigned hardback. You can read the first chapter on my website.

The publisher asked me to write something about the genesis of the book, and I’m including that below.

In 1999, after three years in southern Sudan, my wife and I moved to Egypt. Soon after we arrived, I picked up E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, which has been called the best guidebook ever written. It deftly melds the mythology and history of the city with modern-day landmarks. In the opening pages, Forster gives a brief synopsis of the Gnostic cosmogony, discussing the demiurge and Sophia, the last of the fallen angels. Reading his overview, I had a vision of a fallen angel on a Cairo sidewalk, and knew I would write her story one day.

Seven years later, the notion of a literary and detective agent came to me, and dovetailed with the earlier vision of the fallen angel. In the meantime, I’d discovered the Nag Hammadi texts and had delved deeper into Gnosticism, and realized I could fruitfully bring that knowledge to bear on the tale of Sophia and my blundering detective, George Zacharias. The book was started in Beni Suef in Upper Egypt, completed in Madison, Wisconsin, and polished in Ventura, California.

One of the great pleasures I had while working on this book was the discovery of Gustav Davidson’s A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels, an immensely rich and comprehensively researched text. I knew little about angels and their hierarchies when I started out, and Davidson’s book provided the background I needed to create a solid structure. I’ll leave off with the following passage from Davidson’s alluring introduction:

“Without committing myself religiously I could conceive of the possibility of there being, in dimensions and worlds other than our own, powers and intelligences outside our present apprehension, and in this sense angels are not to be ruled out as a part of reality—always remembering that we create what we believe. Indeed, I am prepared to say that if enough of us believe in angels, then angels exist...”

Encounters in Africa

My father has led an extraordinary life. Born into an Amish family in Hartville, Ohio, he was the first in his community to go to college, where he met my mother. They joined Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions, and went to Tanzania, where my mother had been born, and then Sudan, where my father helped set up the Sudan Council of Churches. In 1974, they moved to Nairobi, where he worked first with the National Christian Council of Kenya (NCCK), then volunteered as regional representative for Mennonite Central Committee, and finally served as an adviser to the All Africa Council of Churches. He remains active in Nairobi and the region today.

He is perhaps the most modest person you'll meet, but has had an astonishing influence. While working in rural development with NCCK, he facilitated the creation of the first sand dams in Machakos, which have dramatically raised the water table in the region. The Nairobi Peace Initiative, which he helped set up, has had an enormous impact on the continent, and was instrumental in heading off Kenya's descent into civil war following the 2007 elections. At eighty, he is as active as ever, walking many miles a day and offering his services as mzee (elder).

Last year, my brother and I helped my dad get a collection of his occasional pieces into print. Encounters in Africa is the first volume, containing primarily lighter stuff: book reviews, anecdotes, travel pieces. A second volume, due out later this year, will include weightier material.

Recently, a Canadian Mennonite book group read Encounters in Africa. Their delightful reflections were published by The Mennonite under the title "An Evening with Harold." (The picture is of the author of the piece, not my father.)

The Winged Histories

Sofia's second novel, The Winged Histories, is now out. Her first, A Stranger in Olondria, won the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award. This book takes place in the same densely constructed world. It tells the stories of four women in wartime, and is possibly more gorgeous and heartbreaking than Stranger.

Here's Sofia's blog post about the novel, and here's an interview at the Los Angeles Times.

"Stone Collection"

I have a suite of three poems under the title "Stone Collection" in the latest issue of Masque & Spectacle. The sculpture above is by the featured artist, Jyl Bonaguro.