congratulations!!

death to hardcovers

we cannot keep letting Tor get away with releasing 100-160-page books as $35-40 hardcovers! stop this immediately!

2026 Hugo Awards Presented at: LAcon V, Anaheim, California, USA, August 30, 2026 Hosts: Base design: Lodestar Award trophy design: Awards Administration: Tammy Coxen, Warren Buff, Linda Deneroff, Emily January, Ro…

Congrats to everyone who was nominated, but the most congrats to @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org and @mealofthorns.bsky.social for being nominated two years running in their categories! Big fucking kudos!

I liked The Tainted Cup well enough (despite its tedious politics) but A Drop of Corruption was simply not a good mystery novel as well as still having tedious politics. sorryyyyy

I really enjoyed this essay and Nat's look at the play between layers of colonial history, historiography, and the different frames for realism in non-Western literature. The latter point is especially compelling b/c I've never been convinced by the argument about (un)real/(im)possible for sf vs f.

the missed crucial detail is also something I still want to work on, if I ever have the time and money to go back to CBU and consult the archival document in question. I have a pdf scan, but it's a typescript with handwritten annotations from the '30s and it's just not quite legible enough, I fear.

the missed crucial detail is something I'm pretty sure any Gaelic specialist would have immediately flagged, but I was, alas, working at an institution with only one Celticist (my supervisor), and he was a medievalist, though he was extremely patient with me and gave good feedback nonetheless.

postcolonialism and Nova Scotia Gaelic literature since ca. the '20s (in a novella, three plays, and some contemporary poetry). by the time I finished I'd already come to see parts of it as insufficiently attentive to settler colonialism, and also I missed a crucial detail in my first chapter.

Thomas Mofolo's Chaka, translated from Sotho by Daniel P. Kunene, is a (pseudo-)historical maybe-fantasy(?) from 1925 following the rise and fall of Shaka kaSenzangakhona. definitely worth a look, maybe particularly for SFF readers, as I suspect it was an influence on Charles R. Saunders's Imaro.

an-bhrón orm a chloisteáil gur bhásaigh Máire Ní Bhraonáin :'-(

Project V STEMinist mecha fantasy meets reality television in this high-stakes novel from the author of A Magical Girl Retires—a wildly imaginative tale of sibling bo...

Park Seolyeon's Project V (tr. Gene Png), coming next week with all the other Korean books this month lol: www.harpercollins.com/products/project-v-park-seolyeon?variant=44012500877346

your fellow activists.........

my experience has been that few non-specialists actually know what "magical realism" means, in much the same way that few non-specialists know what "gothic" actually means.

Excellent stuff! Nat works on such a cool range of literature and I'm always excited to read about it. Makes me think more capaciously about genre than I'm often wont too.

Chaka / an duilleag gheal

nothing compared to some of @guynes.bsky.social's reviews but I did write about 3,600 words about Thomas Mofolo's classic Sotho-language novel Chaka (tr. Daniel P. Kunene), on "African literature", historicity and historiography, and fantasy: anduilleaggheal.neocities.org/leirmheasan/...

“Yale admits roughly 2,300 students a year. SUNY’s 64-campus system serves nearly 400,000.”

never underestimate my commitment to translating things into dead languages for the sake of a joke

τό μου ὄνομα ὲστὶν Ἴννιγος ὁ Μοντοϊάδης. τὸν πατέρα τὸν ἐμοῦ ἀπέκτεινας. παρασκευάζου θνῄσκειν. (I don't know NT Greek, don't @ me)

funny little extra resonance — "you killed my F/father"

there's a timeline where English standardization went differently and Yorkshire, Northumbrian, Cornish, etc. "English"es are regarded as distinct regional languages à la Gallo, Franconian, or Leonese.

ime North American English speakers severely overestimate the diversity of English in the US and Canada and severely underestimate the diversity of English in actual England. there are "English"-speakers alive today who have (forms of) "thou" as their default second person singular pronoun!

Ancillary Review of Books: Year 7! Questioning power, imagining possibility: ARB provides thoughtful criticism of speculative fiction. Help us pay our writers and staff!

Amazing: we're already halfway to our first stretch goal! Thanks to everyone who's donated or shared already; spreading the word about ARB's fundraiser helps a ton!

*though, I think, NOT unrelated to it

lol

LOUDER for the folks who want to incorporate "Native American myths" *pukepuke* into their shitty writing.

before you tell me about your Folklore Creature I want to know: who told the story? (who told it to them?) who recorded it? who transcribed and/or translated it? how does it fit within the broader field of oral narratives in its community of origin? is/was it understood as fictional or historical?

this is tangential to Nicolopoulos's point (though, I think, unrelated to it), but I think a lot of "folklore"-inspired anglophone SFF is produced by writers who have minimal exposure to actual oral narratives and are working instead from retellings and summaries (of summaries, in some cases).

"Intellectual Colonialism and the Erasure of South and Eastern European Writing Voices: Another Tikka-Masala" by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos. Apex Magazine, Issue 152.

"All ESL and EFL authors ask is to let us cook." 🔥📚🍽️

New nonfiction today by @sophiamweaves.bsky.social: "Intellectual Colonialism and the Erasure of South and Eastern European Writing Voices: Another Tikka-Masala"

Read it here: www.apexbookcompany.com/a/blog/apex-...

The sooner you realize that Mark Carney sees Canada less as a nation filled with humans and more a series of resources to sell off to the highest bidder the sooner it all makes sense

C.J. Cherryh's Fires of Azeroth is the last of the original trilogy of her Morgaine cycle, a gripping conclusion and a both grim and hopeful look at the unending task of changing the world.

but a solid third of the students in my comp lit grad program were — somewhat frustratingly, as a languages-and-literatures person — there first and foremost because they were interested in continental philosophy and there wasn't really space to do that in a philosophy department.