Calls for reviews & essays: February 2026

The Thing You Do When Crying Isn’t Enough: for the latest Small Press Dispatch, @chloroformtea.bsky.social looks at Syr Hayati Beker's WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE (@stelliform.press)

Includes a link to and kind words for my Schweblin review - please read! - but also a fascinating discussion between Due, Ruff and Martinez on religion and horror, which means it’s time for me to recommend RELIGION OF FEAR again. Jason was a very important mentor for me.

I'd love to read some decent books (nonfiction) and articles about space futurism throughout the last century, what people tried to predict for the real world and what fantastic obsessions in that field either failed or succeeded, in whichever way. Have any of you got some decent recs for me please?

Fashions in Stupidity: @mishagw.bsky.social interviews K. J. Parker about his latest novella, MAKING HISTORY (@tordotcom.bsky.social

Very cool news!

Join us on the 138th anniversary of the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs by the state of Illinois as we mark the return to print of THE FAMOUS SPEECHES OF THE EIGHT CHICAGO ANARCHISTS, edited by Lucy Parsons & with a new intro by David Roediger. @akpress.org pilsencommunitybooks.com/events/48765

You don’t have to mourn war criminals. You don’t have to issue condolences to their families. You don’t have to launder their legacies. Save your grief for the innocents they killed, maimed or tortured without ever seeing justice served to their executioners.

Calls for reviews & essays: February 2026

New episode of A Meal of Thorns! Scholar, writer, and CRSF organizer E.F. McAdam is on the podcast to discuss Hiromi Kawakami's UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD (tr. Asa Yoneda, @grantabooks.bsky.social/ @catapultbooks.bsky.social)

Dredging this column up now The Last to Drown has won a British Fantasy Award. It's a wonderfully atmospheric read, prefect for this time of year, and if I or the award can't convince you maybe Roseanna can.

Congratulations to all of the winners and finalists of the World Fantasy Awards!

Read more SFF in translation! Translate more SFF! Publish more deep dives on translated SFF like this excellent new column on a novel about the challenges of communication across species.

Our latest link round-up is live! Reviews, essays, some events and CFPs from around the web for lovers of speculative fiction and criticism: ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/11/01/w...

Unscientific Flights of Fancy: Gareth A. Reeves reviews Kate Holterhoff’s Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859–1914 (@ohiounivpress.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/31/u...

Absolutely fascinating. I had no idea about this book and I read a lot of translated SFF. Sometimes I just don't know how to get people to tell me about things. Thank you @coimeas.bsky.social and @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org for telling me about things :)

Doug Armato, who has helmed the 100-year-old press for 27 years, is retiring at the end of December. His tenure saw the expansion of the press’s list and the development of strong Indigenous studies, trade, and regional publishing programs.

Last week's mixtape featured a highlight reel of reviews about Rakesfall, winner of the 2025 Le Guin Prize for Fiction. This week's issue will feature a rec list from @chloroformtea.bsky.social to celebrate the launch of #NovellaNovember!

In the first entry in a new series that re-examines overlooked SFF in translation, @coimeas.bsky.social draws our attention to language, gender, and more in Elia Barceló’s NATURAL CONSEQUENCES, tr. Andrea Bell & Yolanda Molina-Gavilán (Vanderbilt University Press)

Thinking of Barthelme as speculative, or floating within the larger pool of irrealism, is syncing up nicely with some thoughts I’ve been working on with weird genre/canon formation, especially pulling on this excellent thought by Timothy Jarvis and Helen Marshall

✨🎉The Sunburst Award Society is delighted to announce that Blackheart Man (Simon & Schuster) by Nalo Hopkinson is the winner of the 2025 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. @nalohop.bsky.social is now a three time winner of the award. Congratulations Nalo!

You should read this anthology of Black speculative fiction from Canada: houseofanansi.com/products/as-...

New Weird critics have gotten so much good content out of reading speculative fiction into New Weird, to the point now that reading weird post-modernism back into SF feels fun. Barthelme's stories work great for this but my fave is Moore right away calling Picnic at Hanging Rock a portal story.

A nice review of B. Catling's A MYSTERY OF REMNANT, for those of you who need a nudge to take a chance on this posthumous collection. "A delightfully strange formal oddity of a book."

Redefining the Grotesque: Cynthia Shin reviews Joela Jacobs' ANIMAL, VEGETAL, MARGINAL (@iupress.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/22/r...

Big congrats to Vajra Chandrasekera for RAKESFALL's win; well deserved! (The entire UKLG Prize list is stellar, by the way: a snapshot of diverse literary excellence.) ARB editor @mishagw.bsky.social interviewed @vajra.me about the novel last year:

ICYMI, I’m writing a quarterly column on collections of weird fiction. So far we’ve got an intro, one on Steve Rasnic Tem, Ananda Lima, and Christi Nogle, and another on John Langan, Rebecca Campbell, and B. Catling. There’s a lot of weird theorizing and words like “apophatic” and “genric”.

For the latest episode of "A Meal of Thorns", our critical book-club, editor Jake Casella Brookins sat down with writer Timothy Moore to talk about surrealism and style in Donald Barthelme's 60 STORIES: ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/20/a...

In 1999, the LA Times asked 36 writers, from Susan Sontag to Elmore Leonard, to share their neglected classics of the century, books they loved but which failed to find the readers they deserved. You can read their responses here: neglectedbooks.com/?...

Profane Illuminations II: @megapolisomancy.bsky.social on weirdness and open-ness in Langan's LOST IN THE DARK (@wordhorde.bsky.social), Campbell's THE OTHER SHORE (@stelliform.press), and Catling's A MYSTERY OF A REMNANT (@swanriverpress.bsky.social)

Interesting to pair this, which makes the point that most translated SF is from non-genre-specialist publishers, which has an impact on the types of SF that get translated (a point I broadly agree with), with ...

Bodies and Truths Unshelved: @jbarchivist.bsky.social reviews Cassandra Khaw's THE LIBRARY AT HELLEBORE (Tor Nightfire)

Pilgrims of Time, Pilgrims of Memory: for the latest Small Press Dispatch, @chloroformtea.bsky.social looks at boundaries of life, death, format, and language in and around Mai Ishizawa's THE PLACE OF SHELLS, translated by Polly Barton (@sceptrebooks.bsky.social/@ndbooks.bsky.social)

Contributors Wanted! Do YOU want to write for Nerds of a Feather? www.nerds-feather.com/2025/10/cont...

You should read reviews. And write them. And subscribe to publications that run them.

Discomfort and Unreliability In Antarctica: @klaxoncomms.com reviews Quan Barry's THE UNVEILING, out now from @groveatlantic.bsky.social! ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/14/d...

ANNOUNCEMENT🎺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Introducing our bona new quarterly literary magazine: FANTABULOSA! Pushing the boundaries of bold, authentic, QUEER storytelling. Bringing you stories of the uncanny, the dangerous and the fantastical. & thanks to our brilliant #WrathMonth backers, we're fully funded for 2026 🤘

this book is absolutely wild, not always in a good way but always in a both aesthetically and literary-historically fascinating way — AND it's exactly the kind of communist Popular Fiction™ I have been begging publishers to translate/(re)publish for years.

The #2025IgnyteAwards for Critic is @mayagittelman.bsky.social

Voices From the North: @jbarchivist.bsky.social reviews AS THE EARTH DREAMS: BLACK CANADIAN SPECULATIVE STORIES, edited by Terese Mason Pierre (@houseofanansi.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/10/v...

You’ve Been Propagandized: Nat Harrington (@coimeas.bsky.social) reviews Marietta S. Shaginyan’s YANKEES IN PETROGRAD, translated by Jill Roese (@mitpress.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/09/y...

We need these kinds of magazines to publish nonfiction. It's a tough time for literary criticism, essays about ideas, creative non-fiction, and I'm thrilled to see Apex is going to take pitches. Support if you can!

Mirrors, Doorways, Holes In the World: JL George (@jlgeorge.bsky.social) reviews Hailey Piper’s A GAME IN YELLOW (@sagapressbooks.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/08/m...

There's a lot of received wisdom about what motivates readers to preorder, but I've been wondering if cold hard data can back that up -- so I'm doing SCIENCE! Got ~20 minutes to do a survey on your preorder habits (or non-habits)? forms.gle/RhfegAyrAWcM... Please signal boost for sample size! 📖✨

A Blighted World: @thefatherswork.bsky.social reviews Yume Kitasei's SALTCROP (@flatironbooks.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/07/a...

In our latest critical book-club, we talk about Melissa Scott's BURNING BRIGHT (@torbooks.bsky.social), a queer cyberpunk/space opera about political machinations and online role-playing games, with author Ursula Whitcher!

📢 New on the Studies in the Fantastic blog! ✨📚🌙🌀🔮💫📖 We’re thrilled to launch our new blog series—created in partnership with the Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University—spotlighting fresh and innovative research in horror studies. @horrorstudies.bsky.social

🎉🎉🎉 Congratulations to the 2025 Lambda Literary Award Winner for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction: Metal From Heaven by August Clarke! 🎉🎉🎉 @sapphomancer.bsky.social @erewhonbooks.bsky.social @kensingtonbooks.bsky.social #Lammys2025 #LammyAwards

This round up is always good, but I glanced at it this afternoon and decided to spend some time with it this evening, and @casella.bsky.social found a bumper crop of thoughtful writing specifically about criticism and culture in the face of the here and now.

Perils of Love: Rym Kechacha reviews Moussa Ould Ebnou's THE NEW EVE, translated by Paul Roochink (@iskanchipress.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/03/p...