R. B. Lemberg discusses their acclaimed debut THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES in a REDDIT AMA at r/books on Friday, September 4 at 2PM CST.

BUZZFEED includes the book among 7 New Books Coming Out This Week You Should Definitely Read.

THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES by R.B. Lemberg is a lyrical and complex fantasy novella featuring two elderly trans characters. Uiziya is trying to learn the four profound weaves. She’s mastered three out of the four and lacks the bone cloth. In order to learn how to weave the bone cloth, she needs to go to her aunt Benesret, who is an outcast in the desert who is weaving bone cloth for the evil Ruler of Iyar’s assassins. A nameless man referred to as nen-sasaïr recently changed into a man and is trying to learn about his identity in his heavily gender-stratified culture. He’s also trying to lay some of his past demons to rest. Their two quests both lead them to confront the evil Ruler of Iyar.

— Margaret Kingsbury

CHAIN INTERACTION agrees.

Overall this book surprised me with how much I enjoyed it and how powerful my feelings were by the end of the story, it’s emotional for sure and also hopeful and beautiful and tragic and all other emotions that it should not be possible to pack into a small package like this.

Jo Ladzinski on their blog JO WRITES FANTASY also enjoys it.

A delightful debut about identity, art, and friendship.

J. A. Jablonski for DANTE’S WARDROBE appreciates the soul-bearing THE FOUR PROFOUND WEAVES.

I am in the end, I guess one might say, a creature of the work, of deep storytelling, and of imagination. In Lemberg’s novella, I find all three. They craft their writing. There is cadence to the sentences, the narrative flow, and the plot itself. They know how language works to deepen the culture surrounding people and their doings. Character names sound real. The words used to describe artifacts, cultural behavior, the sociology of the different peoples all ring true. With regard to the journey that is imagination, Lemberg bends their mind (and heart too, one senses) into that gap between and emerges with the wings of the redwing hawk. This tale seems to have been torn from their soul.

At REDDIT r/Fantasy, leftoverbrine praises the novella.

The writing is beautiful, pacing very different from your standard fantasy. I loved getting to know the characters, their journey venturing into a world with bird gods, flying carpets and mountains of bones is so unusual. It takes a slow, thoughtful course, pondering the conflict between change and stability, the cruelty that rigid stability can wreak on the individual.