Samuel Sattin

Samuel Sattin is a graduate of the Mills College MFA in creative writing and the recipient of NYS and SLS Fellowships. His work has appeared in Salon Magazine, io9, Kotaku, The Good Men Project, and Heeb Magazine,and been featured in the The New Yorker, amongst others. He is currently a Contributing Editor at The Weeklings, and lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, beagle, and tuxedo cat. League of Somebodies is his first novel.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Sattin's reply:

I’ve been reading an odd combination of highbrow and lowbrow lately. One of my favorite literary works in recent months has been Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. It’s one of those works that barely needs any page space at all to conjure up elaborate, meaty tales that leave you both devastatingly nostalgic and intellectually fulfilled. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I think Keret is probably one of those global geniuses whose brain was simply assembled from earth’s finest materials by pure happy accident.

On the less upmarket end, however, I’ve been consuming a mix of non-fiction, graphic novels, and sci-fi fantasy. Grant Morrison’s mythic odyssey Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, is one of the best things I’ve read in years, hands down. If you’re at all interested in comic books, then dash out immediately and pick this one up. Morrison, with his characteristically psychedelic sentence-works magicks together threads of mysticism, psychology, and philosophy, quilting them into both a memoir and an all-encompassing evolutionary explanation of the comic book, and why it is these pen and ink artifacts have had such a resounding impact on our culture.

Like everyone else in America, I’m slogging my way through the ingenious but unnecessarily dense A Dance with Dragons. Of course it’s amazing, but I can’t spend too much time with it for fear of missing out on a lot of wonderful reads. Books such as Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners, for example, are haunting and brilliant. Brian K. Vaughan’s glorious new comic series Saga has floored me with its exaction and expertise. That one in particular combines a brilliantly unusual mix of Heavy Metal-style, sexually obscure science fiction and epic elements from Star Wars, Dune, and Blade Runner. Every issue just seems to get better; not that I would expect much less from the guy who created Y The Last Man.

Visit Samuel Sattin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue