Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation

Stories of Your Life and Others

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Jacob McMurray

Subterranean Press is proud to announce the signed limited edition of Ted Chiang’s landmark collection, Stories of Your Life and Others.

A woman learns an alien language that enables her to see her future.  A man endures the death of his wife at an angel's hands, but must learn to love God in order to be reunited with her in the afterlife.  Students on a college campus make a political statement by disabling their ability to recognize beauty.  Combining scientific curiosity and narrative intricacy, Ted Chiang's award-winning collection explores the boundaries between reason and faith, between determinism and our ability to choose, between words and the concepts we try to describe with them.

Their edition will be oversize, printed in two colors throughout, with a die cut dust jacket (their first ever!), featuring a wonderful design and interior artwork for each story by Jacob McMurray.

Table of Contents:

• Tower of Babylon
• Understand
• Division by Zero
• Story of Your Life
• Seventy-Two Letters
• The Evolution of Human Science
• Hell Is the Absense of God
• Liking What You See
• Story Notes
• Acknowledgments

Limited: 300 signed numbered hardcover copies and sold out pre-publication

Lettered: 26 signed, specially bound in white leather housed in a custom traycase

Exhalation

Dust jacket and interior illustrations by Dadu.

A note from the Najeebah Al-Ghadban, the designer of Exhalation:

This special edition of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation utilizes color and illustration throughout its design to enter and create an otherworldly realm. The illustrations, by artist Dadu Shin, establish all that is painterly and human while the interruption of blue gradations of color, both in the text and on the page, expose a multidimensional plane within the confines of the very flat and physical page. Color here stands in place of time and light, and through the breadth of its shades and uses, highlights and exposes the subtleties of the worlds Ted builds in his collection of stories. 

About the Book:

A merchant in medieval Baghdad is given the opportunity to revisit his greatest mistake. An anatomist who is made of metal and breathes argon decides to dissect his own brain. A woman and a man spend years fulfilling their responsibilities to the software children they created. A journalist wrestles with the way technology shapes our ideas of what truth is. An archaeologist who studies evidence that the Earth was recently created encounters something she can’t explain. A therapist counsels people obsessed with what their alternate selves have done.

These are characters we can relate to, whether the worlds they inhabit resemble our own or not. Like us, they are fascinated with the world; like us, they are trying to use what they’ve learned in their quest to live a meaningful life.

“If a story helps us through a deliberation, we owe something to it even though its events didn’t take place in our universe. Considered in this light, multiple selves and speculative responsibilities turn out not to be all that abstruse; what Chiang has done is take the idea of fiction seriously.” – Caleb Crain, The New York Review of Books

Table of Contents:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
• Exhalation
• What’s Expected of Us
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
• The Great Silence
• Omphalos
• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
• Story Notes
• Acknowledgments

Limited: 300 signed numbered hardcover copies

Lettered: 26 signed, specially bound copies, housed in a custom traycase

Consignment (Tim's Stuff) - Lettered Set (As New): 

This is a unique one of a kind set, it is not Lettered or marked PC, each book is bound as a lettered book and housed in a lettered  traycase BUT the limitation line is designated "Founder's Copy". No other sets were designated in this manner, this is your chance to own the rarest and most unique Lettered State of this set of books.