Wizards Vs. Lesbians

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 h…

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 i…

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.

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 ch…

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 p…

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 D…

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…

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 do…

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 g…

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 cultura…

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…

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 …