Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

Thank you first and foremost to Zu for understanding why I need to do this and for making it easier, and for being the best person I know.

My agent, Kim-Mei Kirtland, is smart and wise and willing to answer even my most ridiculous questions. My hugest thanks to her and Megan Gelement and everyone else at HMLA.

I want to thank my editor, Rebecca Brewer, for believing in this book, and for having a clear vision of how to make it better. Also huge thanks to Megha Jain, Alexis Nixon, Tara O’Connor, Jessica Plummer, Sheila Moody, Miranda Hill, Jason Booher for the cool cover, and the rest of the team at Ace and Berkley.

Thank you to LJ Cohen, Donna Buckles, Kelly Robson, Amira Pinsker, Ellie Pinsker, and Marlee Pinsker for reading the first draft and giving excellent feedback, and then sometimes later drafts and random panicked questions along the way, and to Rep Pickard and Sherry Audette Morrow for reading various chapters at various times. Thanks to my writing buddy Kellan Szpara for not only keeping me company, but also for reading at least two drafts and helping me wrap my head around edits.

I want to thank Sheila Williams (and Emily Hockaday!) at Asimov’s for buying and editing my novelette Our Lady of the Open Road , which features Luce at another point in her life. This novel wouldn’t exist without that story, and that story always wanted to be an Asimov’s story.

Thank you to the Red Canoe (Josie, Tina, Matt, and everyone else) for letting me write the entire first draft at their family table. Actually, I wrote the original story there, too.

Thank you to my father, to Esther, to Milton, to the Tudhopes, to the Verskins, to my mother and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and siblings-in-law and nieces and nephew, for your unwavering support and enthusiasm. I love you all very much.

Thank you again to my critique partners and workshop buddies and retreat hosts and Slacks and SFWA, and all the blurbers and everyone else in this amazing community. I absolutely adore the writing community I’ve found, both locally in Baltimore and around the world. Thank you all, individually and as a group, for your friendship and support. You inspire me.

Lastly, stories and music work on similar magic. This book wouldn’t exist without music and the music community, even though I’ve been neglecting that side of things of late. Thank you to SONiA for being the first person to take me out on the road and show me how to live a principled life in music, and to her band disappear fear for teaching me how to always have a clean towel on the road. Thank you to John Seay and to my band-brothers in the Stalking Horses, Jes Welter, Chris Plummer, and Tony Calato, for every wonderful show. Thank you to every band I ever shared a stage or a circle with, and to every musician who ever stepped onstage and mesmerized me, some of whom have tributes hidden in this book. (Apologies to Rahne Alexander & the Degenerettes for titling a chapter after the song “Baltimore” and thus ensuring they have no idea it was meant for them.) I know this might seem like it belongs in my album liner notes instead of my novel, but not a single word of this book would have been possible without all those people and the songs they set loose in the world.

Sarah Pinsker’s Nebula and Sturgeon Award–winning short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s , F&SF , and numerous other magazines, anthologies, and translation markets. She is a singer/songwriter who has toured behind three albums on various independent labels. Her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea , was released in early 2019 by Small Beer Press. This is her first novel. She lives with her wife in Baltimore, Maryland.

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“A lively and hopeful look at how community and music and life go on even in the middle of dark days and malevolent corporate shenanigans.”

“Pinsker has written a wonderful epic about music, community, and rediscovering the things that make us human. Pinsker has an amazing ear for dialogue, a brilliant knack for describing music, and most importantly a profound awareness of silence, in both its positive and negative aspects.”

“Pinsker has one of the strongest voices for character in fiction today; everything her characters do is compelling. When I put the book down, I actually suffered from FOMO because I felt like the characters were continuing on their stories without me.”

“ A Song for a New Day is a compulsively readable story about music, freedom, taking chances, and living with your past. I meant to read it slowly, savoring Pinsker’s near-future world-building and her perfect descriptions of performance, but I ended up gulping it down, so eager to see what happens.”

“A full-throated call to arms in the service of music, creation, and shared experience, A Song for a New Day resists both extremes and easy tropes, offering hope in the face of catastrophe through the engrossing stories of characters you’ll want to spend more time with. Pinsker gives us a future rooted in fully-drawn, believable characters and sensory, unflinching descriptions.”

“Let freedom ring in the growl of an angry guitar chord! Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day is an absorbing tale of a quiet, all-too-believable American dystopia in which a passion for music becomes the secretive, surprising seed of rebellion.”

“Woven through Pinsker’s meticulously crafted future of technology-enabled isolation and corporate-consumerist powerlessness is a stirring anthem against the politics of fear. A dazzling tale told in multiple voices, with not a single note out of place. This is the lyrical protest song that we have always needed, perhaps more so now than ever.”

“[A]n unsparing vision of a near-future world only a few degrees removed from our own, but has the nerve and audacity to leaven the darkness with hope. A powerful novel whose unforgettable characters channel humanity’s true superpowers: art and the act of creation.”

“At last, the answer to the question science fiction fans have been asking: YES, Sarah Pinsker can write a novel with all the energy and heart and wonderful wackiness that characterize her magnificent short stories. A Song for a New Day is a must-read from a new voice you won’t forget.”

“Sarah Pinsker plays genre like a favorite guitar, and I am in awe of her talents. How can a writer so new be so central, so necessary?”