I’m very pleased to announce that Tor.com Publishing has acquired Finna, a new science fiction novella from Nino Cipri. When an elderly customer at a big box furniture store slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but our two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.
Can friendship blossom from the ashes of a relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.
I’m terribly excited to be working with Nino Cipri on Finna. I first encountered Nino when I read their beautiful time-travel story, “The Shape of My Name.” That story moved me deeply, and I can’t wait to show you that Nino writes as touchingly about travel through space as they do when traversing time.
Finna was acquired in a deal with DongWon Song, of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency and is expected to publish in early 2020.
From author Nino Cipri:
“I’ve long been fascinated by labyrinths in unexpected places, and often wondered where they might lead to. I get lost easily, and find big box stores more disorienting than most places. One day, I posed the question to a group of friends: what would a wormhole in IKEA lead to? The obvious answer was that it would lead to more IKEAs, and one could wander forever through successive showrooms of Swedish modernist home furnishings that became stranger and stranger. I can’t help but ground silly premises with serious questions, and I started writing this story at the end of one relationship and the beginning of another. The two main characters became exes who had to navigate alien territories as well as the rocky aftermath of their breakup. This story mixes together a lot of things that are close to my heart: queer relationships and queer feelings, the everyday awfulness of low-wage work, wormholes, and carnivorous furniture. It’s a story about what we can and can’t escape from: capitalism and accountability, labor and love.”
Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer of fiction, essays, and screenplays. They are a graduate of the Clarion Writing Workshop, and a MFA candidate at the University of Kansas. Their debut fiction collection Homesick will be out from Dzanc Books in 2019, and their novella Finna will be published by Tor.com in the spring of 2020. Nino has also written plays, poetry, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer. You can talk to Nino on Facebook or Twitter @ninocipri, or on their website.
