The intimate, incendiary stories in Pascha Sotolongo's elegantly woven debut collection offer an ode to the grief and exhilaration of diaspora, probe the delicate shades of gray between solitude and loneliness, and hinge, ultimately, on metamorphosis. The Only Sound is the Wind is a scar shaped like Cuba--a gorgeous scar.--Joy Castro, author of One Brilliant Flame

In this gorgeous debut, Pascha Sotolongo lyrically blends the fantastical with stories of family, love, and longing. Within these pages are vampires, ghosts, invisible daughters, and near apocalypses, and just as readily, the stories of our secrets, our joys, our fears, and our dreams. A beautiful and spellbinding collection.--Alexander Weinstein, author of Universal Love and Children of the New World

Pascha Sotolongo's collection The Only Sound is the Wind gives us characters who are navigating migrations of body and spirit. Through lyrical and empathetic prose, Sotolongo makes us love these people, and we find ourselves swept along with them in each story's inexorable movement towards their, and now our, new realities. Sotolongo's beautiful debut is proof that the short story is not done with us yet.--Rubén Degollado, author of The Family Izquierdo

These stories--these bewitching portraits of a melancholy dystopia--are spellbinding. . . . With this rich collection, Sotolongo joins the ranks of Margaret Atwood and Cristina Rivera Garza, and other masters of illusion.--Timothy Schaffert, author of The Perfume Thief and The Titanic Survivors Book Club

Captivating. . . . Pascha Sotolongo has written a book that's simply exceptional, filled with startling, surreal, and utterly spectacular stories that demand to be savored.--Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare

Sharp and ineffable--these are immersive stories that show us how the familiar world we live in is brimming with shadowy surprises.--Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences

Rarely have I been so moved, awed, amused, satisfied, and softly startled by a debut, but The Only Sound Is the Wind, the gorgeous new fiction collection by Pascha Sotolongo, is a deft, accomplished, utterly fearless book of short stories that seamlessly meld the mundane and the transcendent, the daily grit of realism with unusual, even surreal elements. And the writing is exquisite, the observations funny and wry.--Joy Castro "Literary Hub"

[A] potent collection...These stories mix the strange and the mundane to intoxicating effect.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2024-10-01

Length: 224 pages