The Deep Forest by Sofía Rhei

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of an exquisite, intriguing collection of short fiction, The Deep Forest by Sofía Rhei, translated from the original Spanish by Kendal Simmons, from Aqueduct Press. You can purchase the book now from Aqueduct Press at https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-274-9.php. You can read a sample from the book at https://www.aqueductpress.com/books/samples/978-1-61976-274-9.pdf. 

 

The Deep Forest offers dark short stories with an uneasy rhythm, dense as the fertile undergrowth that twists into tendrils, wet as the moss on which the dew dwells--tales woven through fragile intuition and legends wrought with the impulses, guilts, and cravings of which we are scarcely aware. 

 Murky mirrors, deceptive will-o’-the-wisps, dryads who know not what they are, wings born from the sting of punishment, keys that bind bodies, the charm of springs that glow with a false fire, girls sharp with thorns, wishes granted and burdened by the weight of death, people who are anything but human and humans who are not quite people--everything has a place in the Deep Forest, a perhaps infinite realm inhabited by all that lives within us without our consent, and where there is nothing more terrifying than a “forever and ever.” 

“From this book spill hundreds of tiny seed-like tales, ready to burrow into the soft soil of your mind. They are strange, sweet, ruthless and profound, each hinting at briar-twisted paths to darker, wilder glades beyond your sight.” —Frances Hardinge, author of Fly by Night and The Lie Tree

“A treasure chest of jeweled miniatures, all new fables and fairy tales from the fabulously rich imagination of Sofia Rhei.” —Lisa Tuttle, , author of The Silver Bough and The Pillow Friend

 Borges comes to mind occasionally with The Deep Forest, especially his later more parable-like work such as Dreamtigers, but there are also occasional echoes of Kafka and of the gnomic stories of poets like W.S. Merwin....The translation here, by Kendal Simmons, convincingly and sometimes hypnotically conveys a very distinctive voice, which (despite a few odd contemporary colloquialisms like ‘‘ginormous’’) evokes the classic rhythms of the old tale-tellers. The Deep Forest may seem a relatively slim collection, but it contains multitudes.  
  —Locus, Gary K. Wolfe, April 2025