Monster Portraits

Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny autobiography of otherness, it offers the record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of mixed-race children growing up Somali-American in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday—Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief notes and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.
Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the multi-racial child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. Monster Portraits resonates in a world obsessed with the Other, using captivating nomenclature, art, fiction, and essay to examine society’s damaging desire to define and divide. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.
“This is a wondrous book. It reminded me of all the magical and rupturing books I have carried close to my heart, tucked against my body beneath my coat, since childhood. This is not a child’s book, though it could be. The monstrous’ life of ungulates and human-animal compositions, but also ordinary people—the New York City ‘nanny’ perhaps, who snaps one day and does away with the domestic scene before her—proliferate, exit, and enter the world of this book at intervals both soundless and without a visible depth. ‘All monsters,’ writes Sofia Samatar, ‘express relationships: not the ones we dream of, but the ones we have.’ Del Samatar’s drawings, which accompany the brilliant (plainly written yet alchemical) prose of Monster Portraits, are also astonishingly beautiful. I am so excited to hold this book in my hands, like a ‘red bowl.’ And drink from it or eat from it. Again and again. To this end, I am thinking of buying a new coat that fits tightly and has buttons, so that I can indeed hold it very close, in all weathers and at all times!”