Pascha Sotolongo is a Latina writer who teaches college English and holds a PhD in Latinx literature and postcolonial theory.
Her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, Narrative, Witness Magazine, Pleiades, The Normal School, The Chattahoochee Review, Ninth Letter, The Pinch Journal, The Florida Review, and others. Pascha’s fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards, and her short story “The Moth” won the Ninth Letter Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. “Spanish Girls,” a narrative essay, won the Salem College Penelope Niven Award for Creative Nonfiction. Other essays have been published in Saw Palm and 1966.
Especially concerned with poverty, Pascha’s writing frequently engages with Latinx or other minoritized identities and their intersection with class and postcolonial motifs. Much of her writing is slipstream or magical realist.
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The Only Sound Is the Wind by Pascha Sotolongo
W.W. Norton, 2024
One of Electric Literature's Best Debut Story Collections of 2024
A captivating debut collection exploring longing, loneliness, and connection, in stories that feature Cuban American characters and uncanny, speculative twists.
In the tradition of narrativa de lo inusual (narrative of the unusual), The Only Sound Is the Wind combines the fantastic with the everyday, weaving elements of magical realism and surrealist twists to sharpen our view of human (and animal) connection. In the title story, the arrival of a mail-order clone complicates a burgeoning romance; a lonely librarian longing for her homeland strikes up an unusual relationship in the award-winning “The Moth”; when humans start giving birth to puppies and kittens in “This New Turn,” a realignment of the natural order ensues. With a playful tenderness and satirical bent, The Only Sound Is the Wind explores solitude and communion, opening strange new worlds where characters try to make their way toward love.
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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