Taiwan Travelogue reminded us of Kitchen, and so it's off to Kitchen we went. It's a classic, a plate of mourning-flavored comfort food, and there is at least one queer woman in it.
Also! We're hoping to record our 5th anniversary Q&A episode this week. If you have any last-minute questions (indulge us!) - send them along here, at our tumblr or at our email address, wizardsvslesbians at gmail dot com.
A Japanese travel writer goes to Japanese Taiwan in 1938 and falls in love. A series of fictional and non-fictional authors take the story she wrote about it, bury it in layers of history, translation and metatext and leave it to ferment. The result is delicious.
Among the many neat tricks this book pulls off is maintaining a light, fantastical tone while very much being about death and mourning. It never lets the reader off the hook, either - every bit of escapism comes with consequences.
We are coming up on five entire years of Wizards vs Lesbians.
To mark this occasion, how about a Q&A? Do you have questions for us? About anything? We also give romantic advice, if you need some.
DM us here or email us at wizardsvslesbians at gmail.
Thank you as always for listening.
We cover some stories that posit queer desire as a counter-revolutionary force (and also one about how straight desire still sucks.) All are available to read for free, and you should; this is a particularly good batch. Check the episode description for links.
We're joined by @casella.bsky.social in a discussion of a book that is very gonzo, very silly, very long, and overwhelmingly, agonizingly British.
:)
This one takes a cool idea - the corpo government sells you masks that enhance your abilities around specific attribute clusters, including being a scared little bunny rabbit if you need to be paranoid professionally - and uses it mostly to ruminate on gender and trauma. The plot is also there.
This is a silly book, but in its silliness it made me feel things like hope and joy. Might not do the same for you, but worth a shot, right?
It's also an early work by Eleanor Arnason, and is as such inherently of interest to Arnason fans, i.e. people of taste.
What happens in it? Uh
You should read Oniisama E if you like Utena - it's short, it's beautiful, it's deeply strange, and it contains blueprints for the next 50 years of development in yuri technology. Watching the anime is optional but in some ways even more informative.
This is a book that simultaneously satirizes and revels in decadence, beauty, revolution and the self-serving delusions of the privileged. It's about the 60s, baby!
This is clearly not the highlight of Tanya Huff's literary career, but there's a lot to enjoy anyway - a great setting and a cool premise let down by an unconvincing central romance and a wandering plot.
That rarest of things on Wizards vs Lesbians, a review of a new release! We're glad we got to this one - it's really good.
You're living in a haunted house which is ruled by a monstrous old woman and you have to solve a mystery. How you will feel about this depends on several factors, such as: what genre is this? Are there sociopolitical ramifications? How many spiders are there? Do you think spiders are hot?
This is a poetic post-apocalypse ruminative road trip novel, but it's also good, in large part because it's interested in unpicking the stoic masculinity that usually underpins that kind of story. Thanks to Kerstin Hall for bringing it to us and for the discussion - read Asunder if you haven't.
A book about the collapse of faith in institutions both secular and spiritual, and about the nasty things one finds underneath them in times of desperation. Unfortunately, the social commentary is stronger than the story itself, which starts to wander after a promising start.
This one is about what the girlies get up to in the Brown (legally not Brown) MFA writing program, and what happens when a cool alternative girl arrives to judge them. It involves a surprising amount of exploding animal parts.
This book shows up with a fistful of pain and a fistful of silliness and hits you with the ol' one-two. It's like anime in that respect. You can fit all the symbols and ideas you want into an anime, and they don't necessarily have to work together - in the end, it's all about the spectacle.
Our hero Tam Lin has to orient herself in a massively complex network of privilege and power and family ties while horrible things will not stop happening to her, even for a second. It's been like this since she was six. Ready to join her?
If your father writes a bunch of books about fatherlessness and faithlessness, and you read them under the covers when you're ten because you love your very-much-present dad, what happens when you try to continue his work as an adult?
We're very glad @byzantienne.bsky.social brought us this puzzle.
All the stories we cover in this one are available to read online - click through for the links. Our major takeaway is that you should keep an eye on Lowry Poletti, both to read what she writes next and in general.
Last time Kat brought us Pale Fire (20th c, short, meta) - this time she brings us Middlemarch (19th c, long, Major.) Next time we're going to make her do Story of the Stone (18th c, 5 vols, CLASSIC OF CHINESE LITERATURE.) In the meantime, enjoy our discussion of what turns out to be a horror novel.
This book came out four years before The Matrix and nailed the gender/power/information/sexuality/control thing so hard that the rest of the genre is still catching up. Thanks to a recent translation, we English speakers finally get to find out where all of this is going.
There are no wizards and no lesbians in The Commodore. It's not even the best book in this beloved series. But there is a little girl with 19th century autism in this one, and that's one of our favorite secondary subjects: monstrous children, and whether they can be cured by becoming Irish.
A deconstruction of wizard school stories, a deconstruction of competence porn, a deconstruction of one particular person's understanding of herself, and a really entertaining fantasy novel to boot. Heartily recommended.
A Xena trading card. Xena and Gabrielle kiss romantically. The text says "eternal friends"
sometimes I think about the "eternal friends" xena trading card. just gals being pals
Naked Bee joins us to discuss the Vows and Honor books, which are about a swordswoman and a sorceress who aren't dating but are married. We ask why that is, and why the author thinks that is, and then we ask whether there was always this much rape in these kinds of stories, and the force-femme, and
150-odd years of built-up curses - race curses, class curses, sex curses, gay curses, curses direct from the last of the four great novels of China - may seem like a lot to surmount, but there's always the possibility that this generation will finally get it right (if they're lesbians.)
Strange Horizons invariably serves up peak Wizards vs Lesbians short fiction. Discounting all other reasons, for this they deserve your support
