ARB's Notable Books of 2025!

Because academic life takes place in the future tense, I'm just going to let everybody know where I will be in *Spring 2027* now: www.capas.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/...

Criticism is literature!

Reactor is proud to continue our history of genre-focused literary criticism. Here's some of our favorite essays on reading, writing, and fiction from the year:

One of the most important December drops every year!

On the third day of Hanukkah, I am kicking off a new project on my blog: a series of short critical essays as I read - for the who-knows-how-many-th time - The Lord of the Rings. Today's essay is an introduction, and new posts will go up every two weeks. wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Aha! "Simplicity will be yours in the grave: On Fascism and Jeffrey Ford’s The Well-Built City"* will publish at the Los Angeles Review of Books the end of the month; perfect way to close out this awful year. * LARB dislikes my lengthy suggested titles so it probably won't actually be called this

For everyone nominating for next year's SFFH awards: ARB's 2025 Awards Eligibility

With a little over a month to go before the deadline to become a Hugo voter for 2026, I'm sharing some of my recs! SFF fan culture is deep and wide, and there are so many creative folks out there deserving of recognition by their peers! #HugoAwards 🔗 ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/2025/12/15/w...

a moment for the dress please

Really enjoying the latest Stories from Glasgow (@uofgartshums.bsky.social), "The Literature of the Impossible"—smart, far-ranging discussion of the fantasy genre with @dimitrafimi.bsky.social, @mjrsangster.bsky.social, @tattersdill.bsky.social, & friend of the show @mariettarosetta.bsky.social:

A Meal of Thorns #39: @chloroformtea.bsky.social is back on the show, exploring class, style, and the roots of dark academia in Donna Tartt's THE SECRET HISTORY!

I'll be honest: this year has mostly felt like a zero-progress slog in terms of getting my writing out there. But I did publish a handful of things, and I'm gonna list them here so I don't forget about them. All but one are free to read, too.

Announcing the National Book Critics Circle 2025 Longlist for Fiction

So @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org has been knocking it out of the park for quite a while. They had a very good article earlier this year on the "World" in Worldcon. It's worth reading. 1/X ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/05/23/t...

Currently reading the new edition of John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time, and once again grateful to @isaacbutler.bsky.social for this 2019 piece and the ensuing Ford revival it prompted. slate.com/culture/2019...

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...

the 30th December is a very betwixt and between date. Enliven it with a discussion of The Female Man, with four passionate enthusiasts for Joanna Russ's strange little book. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1697987549... Link goes out on the day.

Calls for Reviews & Essays: March 2026 ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/12/02/c...

Very sad to hear of the death of John Carey. His book Pure Pleasure - a compendium of Sunday Times columns covering his favourite pleasurable books of the 20C - is a model of good, enthused, informed journalistic book criticism. I’ve read its essays so many times.

For everyone nominating for next year's SFFH awards: ARB's 2025 Awards Eligibility

As 2025 comes to a close, we are excited to present some of our favorite 2025 releases in (or about) translation. From Turkey to Georgia, and China to Italy, our favorite books spanned the globe. Take a look at our picks here, or scroll the thread:  wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

New history of science fiction purchase. #scifi #sciencefiction #books #history

Living in the Moments Between Collapse: @mishagw.bsky.social talks to @isaac-fellman.bsky.social about NOTES FROM A REGICIDE, out this week from @torbooks.bsky.social! ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/04/16/l...

What are we doing here? Why do people agree to work with such journals? I just don't understand. Even if you get published by places like this, hardly anybody's going to be able to read your work. You might as well make it a paper airplane and throw it out a window.

CONTINGENT PHILOSOPHERS! (Contractually, not metaphysically). I’ve been a big fan of @contingent-mag.bsky.social for a while. This year they’re letting philosophy piggyback one of their institutions: the year-end list of books and articles written by non tenured/permanent academics in that year.

So excited to read this new series, especially having come up against serious barriers to finding SFF in translation this year!

surprisingly everyone including myself, I wrote things this year!

Top 10 Books of 2025 featuring @thelincoln.bsky.social, @rjbennett.bsky.social, @jonathanreeder.bsky.social, @ginnytkmr.bsky.social, and more! speculativeshelf.com/2025/12/02/top-10-books-of-2025/

more of this, please (stealing this idea for next year)

This is not a drill. @yaffasutopia.bsky.social is fascinating a workshop series about organizing toward freedom. fnd.us/d2dO71?ref=s...

ARB puts up a call for reviews every month, but: at the end of each year, we find ourselves looking at a *long* list of speculative fiction & related non-fiction that we'd love to cover! Do your part to fight recency bias, and claim one of these!

if you are among the few staff critics reviewing books, films, music, art, &c, it is your professional duty to take a chance on things. Attend a random screening, pick up a self-published book, follow whims and offer full-throated generous praise for anything that makes an impression on a shoestring

reading a pair of wintry wonder tales on @storyhour.bsky.social this Wednesday with the great @ashsmash.bsky.social... join us! www.storyhour2020.com

ARB has posted our AI Policy for reviews, essays, and material being covered. We have not had an issue with this to date, but because there is a lot of strange AI usage floating around, and because we encourage new critics to pitch us, we wanted to clarify: ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/ai-policy/

Academic & critical SFF folks: does anyone know if Fantastika Journal still exists? I went hunting for an article and found that their website is totally down; no movement on their socials for a while.

We still have some talk spaces for next year's Romancing the Gothic online talk series. A reminder that Romancing the Gothic is explicitly trans-inclusive and our programme next year will be celebrating that in numerous talks. Join us. romancingthegothic.com/2025/09/02/r...

Are there any fan artists who can do (Western) TV cartoon characters reasonably true-to-style who want to donate a little mischievous labor to some Canadian creative industry workers in a union fight against corporate greed? If so, send me a message and I can give you details!

For fun I thought I'd post the art corner next to my desk. There's a lot of art throughout the apartment, but these are my particular selection that stay right next to me - and a rare feature of my own art (the embroidery)

The CFP for #CRSF2026 is now live on our blog crsfhome.home.blog! The theme for this year's conference is Systems and Entanglement 🪢 We're so excited to see everyone's abstracts and proposals!

What's the best book *review* you wrote, read, edited, or published this year? I'm rounding them up again for Lit Hub. (Must have a 2025 pub date, no exceptions.)

A week from today, I'll be at Buffalo's @eveninghouse.bsky.social in conversation with @casella.bsky.social of @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org and @mealofthorns.bsky.social. Excited to talk Tell Me Yours, horror fiction, and all things Western New York. Last event of the year. Come through! 🕯️❄️

Hey ARB readers! A quick announcement: December is going to be a quieter publishing month for us, but only because we're working on some big changes for next year. More details here:

Zines in SF/F that are nonprofits AFAIK and thus worthy of your support on this Giving Tuesday. (Pls add others you know of!) BCS @strangehorizons.bsky.social @reckoningmag.bsky.social @escapepod.org @podcastle.org @pseudopod.org

Calls for Reviews & Essays: March 2026 ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/12/02/c...

Friends: if you or someone you know is interested in reviewing our edited collection Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination (see 👇) for a journal, please let me know! An arrangement can possibly be made! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791918...

Listen along to our latest critical bookclub, wherein Cameron Kunzelman and Jake Casella Brookins discuss Ned Beauman's VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER (@sohopress.bsky.social), a near-future climate novel packed with ideas!

Heads up: City Tech (CUNY) is having their free annual science fiction symposium tomorrow. I’m going to try to attend from 2 PM on. Hope to see some of you there! openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/scienceficti...

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and especially to @alexyquest.bsky.social!