Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 258 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Sophia Samatar.

She's the author of the fantasy novels A Stranger in Alandria and The Winged Histories,

and also the Poetry Editor for Interfictions, a Journal of Interstitial Arts.

And we'll be speaking with her today about her new short story collection, Tender.

And now here's our interview with Sophia Samatar.

All right, so we're here with Sophia Samatar.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so your new book is a short story collection called Tender.

So tell a bit about how this book came together.

This book came together.

This book came together over, I believe about five years of writing short stories.

And I never really thought of myself as a short story writer. I thought of myself as more of a novelist. But I came to really love writing the short stories without thinking of them as a book. So when I wrote them I just

wrote them to write individual stories and in fact the idea of creating a book of short stories did not occur to me until my publisher,

Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press, suggested it. He said, what about doing a short story collection? And I said, I don't have enough stories for a collection. And he said, I think you do.

Yeah, you thank him in the acknowledgments.

You say it's a Gavin J Grant who convinced me I had enough good stories to make a book?

Yes.

I think it's interesting that you weren't certain if you had enough good stories because you had three stories in this book that it appeared in best American science fiction and fantasy and all sorts of other anthologies and things as well.

That's true, although of course when we were, when we had the idea and we're putting the book together,

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