Keith Miller's Blog

 

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.

 

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

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 walz, 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 voidGathers 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 spiritWas giving birth daily to monstrous children,I would have liked to live beside a young giantessLike a lazy cat at the feet of a queen.
I'd have liked to watch her body blossom in tandem with her soulAnd grow unfettered in her terrifying frolics;To know by the damp mists floating in her eyesIf 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 drumbeatOf 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 succumbsTo the heavy blows of a tireless battering ram.
Rocked by these monotonous blows, I feelThat 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 motherEven for an evil and ungrateful man;Lover or sister, be the fleeting sweetnessOf a glorious autumn or a setting sun.
Brief task! The tomb awaits; it's famished!Ah, with my head in your lap, let meSavor the last sweet amber rays of autumnWhile I mourn the white heat of summer!

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.

 

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 been one of the chained. It's a wonderful feat of world-building.

 

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.

 

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.

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

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.

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.