For the @strangehorizons.bsky.social 2026 Criticism Special, I wrote about weird fiction being constituted by weird reading, vis a vis Sederholm and Woofter’s The Weird and @undertow.bsky.social’s The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1., in tribute to Maureen Kincaid Speller. It’s a long one.
Up now at @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, I wrote about one of my favorite trilogies, Jeffrey Ford’s The Well-Built City, and what it has to say about living in a society in thrall, the fascist mindset, and the daily work of staying alive.
The cover of "Good and Evil and other stories" against a purple background
"Schweblin is a modern master of uncanny fiction, and she subtly, dreadfully parades around among the literary in these six stories." Zachary Gillan on Samanta Schweblin’s “Good and Evil and Other Stories." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/parading-around-among-the-living-like-nothing-happened/
Up now at the Los Angeles Review of Books, my review of Samanta Schweblin’s excellent Good and Evil and Other Stories! The affect of art-dread! Genre haunting literature! Hauntings without ghosts! Doublings without doppelgängers! lareviewofbooks.org/article/para...
Have kids, don’t have kids, that’s your prerogative, it’s weird for other people to have opinions about it. “I don’t like kids” / “I don’t want to be around kids” is a fucked up, unacceptable position.
Right. But have you ever thought about writing something on profane illuminations?
Graph titled: Unhoused people languish in jail more than 3x as long as the typical defendant.
Compared to the general population, unhoused people are held in jail for 3.5x as long, despite typically being charged with the lowest level crimes
It’s safe to assume that unaffordable cash bail is to blame. No one should have to stay behind bars because they can't afford bail
Since the dawn of time, humankind has yearned to know what the difference is between weird fiction and horror. www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/t...
I know there are mutual aid requests everywhere right now, but: this kid is renting a garage apartment from a neighbor of mine this summer and got kidnapped by ICE while visiting his family in Georgia. Please donate to his legal fund if you’re able. www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with...
I've been threatening for a while to start a column on collections of weird fiction, and so: Profane Illuminations, a quarterly series where I'll look at a few in tandem and see what threads I can draw out about their stories and the genre at large. Quick intro here, first full entry next week.
Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of our own actions at ARB
Some thoughts on the reading of weird fiction as a metaphor for radical awakening in an era of morbid symptoms
what a kill joy
America is wearing me OUT. My nervous system is absolutely fried.
I'm ready to throw 100% of my support behind the politician who is freaking the fuck out.
Not enough people talk about growing into adulthood, expecting to discover that your childhood assessments of adults were way off course, only to find that your ten and eleven year old self were right the whole time.
Preorder my “great” foreword and Undertow will even throw in some @thomasha.bsky.social stories, as a treat
shorten those sentences
Heartbreaking flash essay by Casey Mulligan Walsh ( @caseymulliganwalsh.bsky.social) via @short-reads.org (& originally published in @splitlipthemag.bsky.social). www.short-reads.org/still/
I wrote about this a bit in my last book but it really shakes me that a defining feature of this catastrophic era is that we just keep going to work. We work through pandemics, we work through natural disasters, we work through economic calamity, we work through coups, we work, we work, we work.
Bringing home every person sent to El Salvador and Guantanamo is the only way to change the brutal trajectory we are on
Israeli forces killed Palestinian rescue workers in Gaza’s Rafah, firing on one ambulance after another. The Red Crescent wants an international probe.
So who were the medics Israel ambushed on March 23?
🔗: aje.io/fwi3yj
You've likely already seen some of us shouting, but we're still very excited to share: ARB is a Hugo finalist for fanzine!
ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/04/08/2...
(It’s also wrong to send Americans and/or non-Americans to inhumane domestic prisons, crime or not)
NEW: The shuttered DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties “was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”
By @davidmcswane.bsky.social & @hannahallam.bsky.social
