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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.
She Is Here will undoubtedly appeal to Griffith’s fans, but it doubles as a nice gateway to her career for newcomers. It’s rare that an author’s fiction is offered a mere 50 pages after their reflection on said fiction. When it works, it works. Griffith’s commentary on the creative process will stick with readers long after this collection goes back on the shelf.
—Eric Olson, Seattle Times
She is Here is an excellent and deeply personal introduction to both Griffith’s writing and her perspective on writing. It’s also the perfect pick for a busy quarter, with bite-sized sections you can read in the 10 minutes between classes.—Chaitna Deshmukh, DailyUW
“Dazzling . . . Griffith’s lyrical prose emphasizes the savagery of the political landscape.”
—Paris Review Daily on Hild
“Uncompromisingly packed with non-dogmatic feminist and queer ideologies. . . . Griffith reveals herself to be fluent in presenting realistic science and its implications, capable of cinematic clarity in her prose, insightful with emotions and character.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ms. Griffith is an astonishingly gifted writer. . . . Her work is of the very best in the lesbian and gay literary field.”
—Allen Ginsberg
“In Griffith’s hands, a conversation . . . is as thrilling as a spear thrust through a man’s cheek.”
—Nicole Rudick, New York Review of Books on Menewood
“Gorgeously supple prose . . . startlingly beautiful”
—Amal El-Mohtar, on Hild, NPR
“With its persuasive characters trying to form identities in an unstable society, its midnight streets and shabby apartments, and its vast industrial engines, Slow River is a powerful prose poem on issues that are already with us.”
—Gary Wolfe, Locus
“Nicola Griffith’s prose is beautiful in every sense of the word.”
—April Adams, The Lesbian Review
“Griffith brings all her genius to this book.”
—Maria Dahvana Headley on Menewood
“A serious assault on conventions so enormous that it is very much more dangerous, sometimes, than writing about lesbianism.”
—Dorothy Allison on Ammonite
“A body-slam of empowerment, a roar of frustration so sustained and compelling that it cannot be ignored.”
—Katharine Coldiron, Arts Fuse on So Lucky
“Incisive and devastatingly beautiful.”
—Vulture on Spear
“Brutal, unsparing . . . full of power and healing.”
—Joanne Rixon, Seattle Times review of So Lucky
“Nicola Griffith’s first novel, Ammonite, flies all the banners of traditional sf but beneath the banners, it is armed to the teeth against convention.”
—Interzone
“A queer Arthurian masterpiece for the modern age.”
—Los Angeles Times on Spear
“Hild is a world built fiber by fiber from the ground up, immersive as a river in rain.”
—Amal El-Mohtar, NPR, on Hild
“Griffith’s prose is at once brutal and beautifully wrought”
—San Diego Union-Tribune on Stay
“A knockout!”
—Ursula K. Le Guin on Ammonite
“Fierce! A disconcerting but very necessary book.”
—Dana Hansen, Chicago Review of Books, on So Lucky
“A classic for the ages.”
—Karen Rought, Subjectify, on Spear
“Luxuriously long and utterly absorbing.”
—The Guardian, on Hild
A Writer’s Manifesto
Overwriting the Old Story
Branding: It Burns
Wife
My Story, Mystery
The Women You Didn’t See
DRAWING: GRIFFIN, MAYBE
POETRY
Iceberg
Crippled Body
Love-Hate
Thief
DRAWING: KING BIRD
FICTION
Glimmer
Cold Wind
Down the Path of the Sun
Many Things in Dumnet
DRAWING: HAPPY HOUND
“Otherwise Unremarkable”
Nicola Griffith interviewed by Nisi Shawl
About the Author