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Apex Magazine #18
Apex Magazine Issue 18
The 18th installment of our science fiction and fantasy publication Apex Magazine highlights six talented Arab and Muslim writers. When you purchase this issue you will read stories about mysterious organic books, vampires, and deprecated software. Esteemed Apex Magazine fiction editor Catherynne M. Valente stated on her blog that this themed issue "?will show how Islam is as much a part of the human experience as any other faith or story system that writers of the fantastic draw from." Read and purchase this issue. We think you'll agree with her.
Nook
Published December 6, 2010
85 people want to read
About the author
Catherynne M. Valente
250 books7,750 followersCatherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.
She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.
She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 2, 2020
This is so gorgeous...written as journal entries between a scholar and the book itself who is also a woman. An apprentice finds the book, reads the entries and concludes that his mentor is mad. It is so weird and wonderful.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 1, 2023
This review is just for “The Green Book” by Amal El-Mohtar which I thought had its own separate entry. I do not understand at all what goodreads does to short stories...
An epistolary short story, where the means of communication is a book (a green book...). Many layers, romantic dramatic love story, moody, atmospheric. Very very good and original and like all her writing, it is poetical in a way which works for me (and poetical hardly ever works for me...).
An epistolary short story, where the means of communication is a book (a green book...). Many layers, romantic dramatic love story, moody, atmospheric. Very very good and original and like all her writing, it is poetical in a way which works for me (and poetical hardly ever works for me...).
December 19, 2012
(reposting from this blogpost.)
Once upon a time, a woman named Alissar approached a great King and asked him for a piece of land on which to found a city. The King laughed, tossed her a bull's hide, and said she could have as much land as the hide covered.
Alissar took the hide, and a pair of scissors, and in seven days and seven nights, she had slendered the bull's hide into miles of the finest leather thread, and marked out the borders of what became Carthage.
This story is relevant to the Arab/Muslim issue. Please bear it in mind.
Everything in this issue is engaging with the authority of texts, undermining and re-asserting and deconstructing that authority in a number of ways. Of the original fiction offerings, one story is told in the decaying fragments of a copy of a text, this copy itself framed by an authoritative catalogue description; one is a story illuminated by citations of a text interpreting Scripture, the most authoritative text there is; one is a story guided by text granted authority through its inscrutability, through its randomness, through the decay of textual coherence and authority.
There is a circle closed between my story and saladinahmed's, I feel: where mine is a story trying to present a whole built of fragments, his is a story focused on the fragmentation of what was once a whole -- and while a textual device is initially one of the means of demonstrating that fragmentation, it also becomes the means to shoring them up. Even the reprint, "Kamer-Taj the Moon-Horse," makes a comment on the authority of texts -- though that authority is the means to evil, and must be undermined in order to bring about a joyful resolution.
In the poetry, ach. Samer Rabadi's "Me and Rumi's Ghost" is ALL ABOUT addressing textual authority, dismantling it, and then reforming it into something rich and strange. I wrote a story about a woman who's a book, and this is a poem about a man writing a poem about a poet who is a poem about a man. Jawad Elhusuni's "Tur Disaala" dislocates authority by means of linguistic dissection, saying if these words were different words -- similar-sounding, but in a different language -- the world would be a different world. And oh, gods, Sara Saab's "Al-Manara Dirge" collapses a whole city into a text to be read, collapses it into a love-letter she is writing to it by means of its own brokenness, making alphabets and punctuation of its craters and rubble, constellations of its bullet-holes, ready to be translated into astrology.
This issue was originally conceived of as a response to a text: a text that took upon itself the task of authoritatively deciding who could participate in the story-building of a nation, who was allowed to write it and who was obliged to toe its narrative line. There is a beautiful, devastating symmetry, then, in the fact that these stories and poems form so potent, layered, and sophisticated a counter-narrative. These stories and poems stand, and speak, and sing, and this is what they say:
we speak your language as well as you do, but we are not colonised by it; we will use it to speak our stories, translate our lives into your understanding, and show you how much you miss by trying to silence us. We live between your lines, and though you have never heard of Alissar, we will show you how vast a country lies between them -- how many city-lengths we can scissor out of the bull's hide you deign to grant us.
Elizabeth Moon gave us a hide.
Catherynne Valente gave us scissors.
Once upon a time, a woman named Alissar approached a great King and asked him for a piece of land on which to found a city. The King laughed, tossed her a bull's hide, and said she could have as much land as the hide covered.
Alissar took the hide, and a pair of scissors, and in seven days and seven nights, she had slendered the bull's hide into miles of the finest leather thread, and marked out the borders of what became Carthage.
This story is relevant to the Arab/Muslim issue. Please bear it in mind.
Everything in this issue is engaging with the authority of texts, undermining and re-asserting and deconstructing that authority in a number of ways. Of the original fiction offerings, one story is told in the decaying fragments of a copy of a text, this copy itself framed by an authoritative catalogue description; one is a story illuminated by citations of a text interpreting Scripture, the most authoritative text there is; one is a story guided by text granted authority through its inscrutability, through its randomness, through the decay of textual coherence and authority.
There is a circle closed between my story and saladinahmed's, I feel: where mine is a story trying to present a whole built of fragments, his is a story focused on the fragmentation of what was once a whole -- and while a textual device is initially one of the means of demonstrating that fragmentation, it also becomes the means to shoring them up. Even the reprint, "Kamer-Taj the Moon-Horse," makes a comment on the authority of texts -- though that authority is the means to evil, and must be undermined in order to bring about a joyful resolution.
In the poetry, ach. Samer Rabadi's "Me and Rumi's Ghost" is ALL ABOUT addressing textual authority, dismantling it, and then reforming it into something rich and strange. I wrote a story about a woman who's a book, and this is a poem about a man writing a poem about a poet who is a poem about a man. Jawad Elhusuni's "Tur Disaala" dislocates authority by means of linguistic dissection, saying if these words were different words -- similar-sounding, but in a different language -- the world would be a different world. And oh, gods, Sara Saab's "Al-Manara Dirge" collapses a whole city into a text to be read, collapses it into a love-letter she is writing to it by means of its own brokenness, making alphabets and punctuation of its craters and rubble, constellations of its bullet-holes, ready to be translated into astrology.
This issue was originally conceived of as a response to a text: a text that took upon itself the task of authoritatively deciding who could participate in the story-building of a nation, who was allowed to write it and who was obliged to toe its narrative line. There is a beautiful, devastating symmetry, then, in the fact that these stories and poems form so potent, layered, and sophisticated a counter-narrative. These stories and poems stand, and speak, and sing, and this is what they say:
we speak your language as well as you do, but we are not colonised by it; we will use it to speak our stories, translate our lives into your understanding, and show you how much you miss by trying to silence us. We live between your lines, and though you have never heard of Alissar, we will show you how vast a country lies between them -- how many city-lengths we can scissor out of the bull's hide you deign to grant us.
Elizabeth Moon gave us a hide.
Catherynne Valente gave us scissors.
December 27, 2019
Although not set in the Cthulhu mythos, this short story shares a lot of themes with that grouping of stories in that it’s about a descent into madness that can’t be stopped, even if the person descending knows that it’s happening. The beginning is a little rough, as it’s all set up for that eventual fall, but once the story hits the major section of conversation between the two characters, it moves forward with an inevitableness that matches the theme. Well done.
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April 3, 2024The story by Amal El-Mohtar left me breathless.
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January 21, 2023This edition of APEX features an all Arab/all Muslim themed issue of horror fiction, the first of its kind for the publisher and guest editors of this publication.
April 27, 2023
i read this twice - and by “this” I mean “The Green Book”
August 4, 2021
Meta!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews