It's magical gang warfare in Singapore, circa 1972. All the politics, history and gender you could ask for but folded into a plot that moves at breakneck speed and never lets you lose interest. We really liked this one.
We bring you a pair of novellas, both of which are about living in a big creepy house which is haunted by an ancient woman. They go on to have very different opinions about how cool that would be, even though the underlying metaphors are largely the same. You can read Radcliffe Hall here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/radcliffe-hall/
Kerstin Hall of Asunder fame joins us to discuss a book about aging and the end of the world. (It turns out aging isn't the end of the world, but the end of the world isn't the end of the world either.) There's also a lot of stuff about the internet, autism and knowing the names of plants, but more importantly it's a beautiful little book that is absolutely not afraid to get weird with it.
Cannibalism season continues on Wizards vs. Lesbians, as this one's a story about how all of us would probably eat some human meat the second things get difficult, and how on a metaphorical level we definitely already have. It's not without its problems but it does a good job of capturing how we all felt during lockdown and drawing a line between that feeling and our current predicament(s).
A novel about being in an MFA (but not necessarily an MFA novel) with all the horror that implies. What if your creative process involved doing unethical things to dumb animals, and what if you have a hard time separating your creative process from your sex life?
A book about messianic communism, and also about obsessive childhood love, and also about microplastics. Inspirations cited by the author include Disco Elysium and End of Evangelion. Hang onto your hats.
Life is complicated for a Chinese-Canadian lesbian college kid with PTSD who is also half tiger - complicated enough, you would think, but complication invites complication, and soon she has to ask herself like questions like "is this the apocalypse" and "am I partially responsible for it." Those are pretty standard questions these days, admittedly, and that core of relatability is what keeps a rangy, stressful, fascinating book mostly on the rails.
Arkady Martine joins us to discuss a new spy novel written by Nick Harkaway and starring a bunch of beloved characters created by his father, John le Carré. In doing this, Harkaway has set out what is essentially an impossible task for himself; how does he manage?
Today we cover Closer Than Your Kidneys by Ursula Whitcher, BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE by Lowry Poletti, and There's a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead by Sarah Pinsker.
Our classic literature correspondent Kat Weaver joins us for a look at George Eliot's masterpiece about small towns and bad marriages. We find some wizards in it.
It's very easy to get caught up in the titular metaphor, here - this brief, gauzy cyberpunk novel, written in Taiwan in 1995 and only recently available in translation, peels itself back slowly, revealing layer upon layer, until one can almost see the whole genome of the next thirty years of queer speculative fiction, wrapped up tight inside its core. That being said, please pay particular attention to the content warnings.
Our adventure correspondent Isaac Fellman joins us once again, this time to talk about Patrick O'Brien and the age of sail through the lens of the seventeenth book in the Aubrey/Maturin series. We chose to do it this way a) because we thought it would be funny and b) because this book features a small autistic girl healed through the power of Irishness, which opens an interesting line of inquiry about both the author and the project generally.
What if the Scholomance was a British boarding school, and therefore had funding, prestige and a competent professional faculty that cared about its students? And what if we told the story from the point of view of the Director of Magic, an extremely sensible woman who has devoted herself to a life of public service? And then, finally, what if it turns out that none of that is enough?
At long last we contend with Mercedes Lackey. We are deep in the ancestry of books about girls with swords; so deep that they're not even gay for each other, even though they're married.
The titular manor is lavishly, extravagantly haunted - there are layers upon layers of haunting, over a century's worth, and we get to peel them back one by one. Some of the haunting is inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber, which makes Alexis very happy.
Heather Rose Jones joins us to discuss a delightfully strange book - hell is real, and it's a giant monster that lives underground, and the devil's wife tricked him and took his keys, so she's in charge of it, and she's trying to form a strategic alliance with the king of France, which sucks for you because you're Belgian. Also it's 1328. Fans of Wizards vs Lesbians may enjoy Heather's Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast , for obvious reasons....
This is a historical novel about life in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia in the 1830s, the options available to women at the time and what happens when a man takes an unwilling bride. In that capacity, it succeeds; as a fairy-tale deconstruction, which it's also trying to be, it doesn't.
A young adult novel about a trans girl who wants to be a witch. Witches in this world are feminist/anarcho-primitivist forest mercenaries, though, which doesn't complicate matters for our hero but does for a reader trying to make sense of what's happening.
This one's about a guy who gets stuck in a labyrinth. Lee joins us to discuss why the guy is there and what, if anything, it all means. We all agree it's a very good book but past that point things get a little contentious.
A synaesthete vagabond who wants to live like the Bright Young People accidentally goes to grad school instead. It's like if Foucault's Pendulum was funny.
What if the dude who is possessing you is actually a nice guy? And what if you're the kind of gremlin who can only be fixed by a live-in boyfriend, and by "live-in" I mean in your actual brain?
Masha du Toit joins us to discuss a book about going to college and writing fanficiton which turns out to be laser-targeted at one of our hosts. So what we end up with is a strange mixture of cultural history and personal pain, much like the book itself.
It's this again! In this episode we discuss the following stories: The V*mpire by P.H. Lee Katya Vasilevna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy The Witch Trap by Jennifer Hudak Joanna's Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou...
We could do nothing but weird small press lesbian novellas on this podcast and I'd be happy. This one's about how we really need to blow up the sun but we're too busy having smoldering academic love triangles.
Lianyu Tan joins us for another foray into literature that started life as Xena AU fanfiction (or Xena Uber, in the parlance of the time.) This one starts out as a pirate romp featuring the world's brattiest sub/voluntary slave girl and ends up in some really dark places.
This is the most Wizards vs Lesbians book we've covered in ages, and it's also really good. It's a familiar setup - there's a thing in a pit in a little tiny town and the locals have to keep it fed. The beauty's in the execution.
We adventure into the realm of non-fiction - mostly - for the first time, courtesy of Isaac Fellman, who has joined us to discuss a book about two disasters. The first is the Andree Expedition, a real-life polar quest which failed both disastrously and predictably; the second is an exercise for the reader.
Finally, the all-caps title is correct! During the 2023 Wizzly awards we all said we were going to read Moby Dick by the time the next Wizzlies rolled around, and most of us did. It turns out it's really good. Like, I'd call it the great American novel, at least for the days before women were invented. Has anybody else heard about this?
We kick off a new series of author's choice episodes with Cameron Reed, who has brought us a novel you can chew on like the ragged edge of a thumbnail.
This book is about whether murdering antisemites is a good idea or not, morally and strategically, and as such it's about Israel without ever discussing Israel, which as a rhetorical gambit has its advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that it's therefore a New York Novel and it comes with all the problems that implies.
