Feb 15, 2026
As we enter our fifth year we are giving ourselves permission to get a little weird with our selections. This isn't SF, but it is full of metatextual trickery, so we say close enough; and there are lesbians.
A historical novel masquerading as a contemporary travelogue, translated fictionally from Japanese to Mandarin...
Feb 1, 2026
Layer upon layer of nested mysteries are waiting to be unpeeled at tu reviens, a bafflingly enormous mansion full of/made of more or less stolen art on an island off the New York coast. This book is a really impressive technical achievement and also a lot of fun.
Jan 18, 2026
A particularly good crop of stories. The theme linking these is betrayal - of a lover, of one's family, of one's culture - and the part that desire, queer or not, plays in it.
Read them here:
Another Girl Under the Iron Bell
Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures And Attraction Is When I Do It For You
Jan 11, 2026
Jake Casella Brookins of the Ancillary Review of Books and A Meal of Thorns joins us to discuss a novel by Nick Harkaway. We last encountered Harkaway carrying on his father's spy novel franchise, and this isn't that - it's more Neverwhere as directed by Guy Ritchie - but there's still a lot in there about legacies and...
Jan 4, 2026
A cyberpunk novel about animal masks. This is a potently fertile symbol combo, a blend of metaphor-rich soils, so the only question is what conceptual seeds are being planted here. Look forward to a bumper crop of gender come harvest time, with a scattering of disability discourse (and the odd...
