Gwynne Garfinkle's favorite reads of 2025 ranges from the second-wave feminism classic Bear by Marian Engel to John Wiswell's Wearing the Lion, from Nisi Shawl's The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox to Charlie Jane Anders' Lessons in Magic and Disaster. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Cheryl Morgan shares the highlights of her year in reading and other cultural experiences. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Tansy Rayner Roberts writes about her favorite books, films, television, and theatre performances of 2025. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

I'm super excited to announce that my novella, "The Circus, the Garden, (and Mario Lanza)" has been bought by Aqueduct Press for their wonderful Conversation Pieces series!

In an essay for Aqueduct's 2025 Pleasures series, Nancy Jane Moore recounts her experimentation with a new reading practice as well as her reading for LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press books list. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Just read a vampire story by Carlos Fuentes (novella length). "Vlad" truly creeped me out.

Cat Rambo talks about her most enjoyable reading this year, a cornucopia of books ranging from Kelly Link's Love to KJ Parker's Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead to Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Niall Harrison discusses a selection of a couple dozen titles from his wide-ranging reading this year, ranging from Madeleine Thien to Eva Meijer to Jacek Dukaj. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

[Spelled coupon wrong 4 times writing this (How?!?)] 25% off a bunch of our books from now until year end using code SBP25 smallbeerpress.com/not-a-journa... indiepubs.com/collections/...

It's Wednesday, it's review time. Here's Seamus Sullivan on The Deep Forest by Sofía Rhei, translated for @timmi.bsky.social and Aqueduct Press by Kendal Simmons - 300 short stories in a single, slim, volume. "Reading and analyzing such an assortment of stories posed an interesting challenge."

Read Nisi's Shawl's "Where and When the Livin is Easy," their love letter to Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Xian Mao reflects on her pleasures in 2025. "Pleasure is something to be fought for, for the subaltern to declare their right not only to exist but also to thrive." aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Erin K. Wagner recs her favorite books, films, and shows this year. "Can we propose that consuming art and narrative is a form of self-love? That we read and watch what we enjoy—that which reflects ourselves, challenges ourselves, nurtures ourselves?" aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Vandals decapitated and smashed the statue of Mary in an Evanston church’s outdoor Nativity scene Friday, and the church responded by replacing it with a sign saying Mary was beaten & dragged away in front of her son and is being held in immigration detention. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/15/n...

Dennis Danvers gives respect to and lavishes love on the work of Ellen Glasgow. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

Lisa Tuttle offers her “'best of the best of 2025'”—the books that I’d want on the list if I were a judge for The Clarke Award or World Fantasy or similar. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-... Eleanor Arnason: "[Nghi] Vo’s stories are strange, often disturbing, and wonderful. I like the companion hoopoe, the wandering cleric, the foxes and tigers and mammoths…

Tara Campbell recs her favorite reads of 2025, including work by Bora Chung, Vanessa Fogg, M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Debra Magpie Earling, and others.https://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-pleasures-of-reading-viewing-and_0423412284.html

Is there any clearer message than banning "pregnant people" and "women" alike?

What Sarah Tolmie's been reading. "Conrad. Weird, eh? Why read Conrad in this day and age? Inexcusable old white guy? Well, it’s because, in my mind, Conrad is a weird writer." aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-...

“The proposal is a bad deal negotiated by a lame duck mayor, giving police a big pay raise while allowing them to continue to block accountability and hinder the City’s civilian crisis responders.”

My review of Like Shards of Rainbow Frolicking in the Air by L. Timmel Duchamp is now live at Strange Horizons! I liked this collection a lot: amusing and strange meditations on gender and utopia. Check it out over here: strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Nice to see Nisi Shawl's Making Amends on this list. The list is rich with an abundance of interesting titles flying well under the hype-cycle radar. & some of it is science fiction! lithub.com/100-notable-...

Dammit RIP indeed. The below from qospress is not Freddie’s work; here’s a typical example. I don’t think this one was a Tiptree t-shirt.

Congratulations to our Mayor-elect, @wilsonforseattle.bsky.social! #ThisIsOurCity #Seattle #SEAElex #SeattleElex #KCElex #WAElex

Yesterday, Block Club reported that the feds have said no more prayer outside the facility which is of course not something they can demand or enforce.

Five days left to vote for a Seattle that works for all of us! Find your nearest ballot drop box at the link in my bio. Already voted? Remind five friends! Together, we can build an affordable Seattle.

I'm so sorry to hear that Celeste Rita Baker has died. It was my pleasure to publish her collection Back, Belly, and Side. "I reach!" she wrote. "On St. Thomas, Virgin Islands 'I reach' is one way of saying that you have arrived, you're at the door. So yes, I reach."

For those who think that Trump/MAGA's mess of incoherence & contradictions add up to a lack of ideology, consider Stuart Hall's question: What is ideology but this work of fixing meaning through establishing, by selection and combination, a chain of equivalences?

✨🎉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!

One thing all the “political violence is never okay” discourse seems to ignore is the reality that state violence is political violence.

you fucked around and now the Episcopalians are doing memes. are you happy now. are you

Seen today on a fence in Port Townsend.

"[T]he world of our lives is made out of language. With the wrong language, one of strict categories and confinement, the world becomes a fake, a stage set whose actors don't know they are in a play, a Potemkin village whose inhabitants believe they live in the real world." --Rachel Pollack

I've just posted a reflection on how misleading it is when an important form of political speech is called "protest" by the mainstream media. aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2025/10/publ...

L.A. stood strong and Portland will too! Terrible decisions continue by the so-called U.S. Department of War, pointing the cannons at its own citizens. Enjoy this lovely poem by @gwynnega.bsky.social strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

Trump’s allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, & TikTok. They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ & NY Post. They own Sinclair Broadcasting which has 200 tv stations and local news in 100 markets. “Freedom of speech” is now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is.

I love Leo Tolstoy's take on the Great Men theory of History, which he discourses on throughout War and Peace. Near the end of that magnificently acute novel, he responds to 19th-century historians' treatment of Napoleon by declaring, "Napoleon was a tool of History."

There is a really valuable initiative to get a Hugo Award category for Translations, and I am a huge supporter of this idea. Translations deserve their own category and recognition--they are a unique subsection of SFF and have done so much for the global SFF community translatedhugo.org

Words from Audre Lorde I--we--need to keep remembering: when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid

We are now HALF-WAY through the fund-drive, with two and a half weeks remaining. We are 2/3 of the way towards meeting our baseline funding goals for next year. A lot of rewards and special pieces still remain to be unlocked. To find out, and to, donate: www.kickstarter.com/projects/str...

"War is the modern human sacrifice ritual." @luisahteish.bsky.social

I really need folks to stop acting like disability is full of people “scamming” the system. The average person has no idea how hard it is to qualify. How dehumanizing the process can be. How much you have to sacrifice & give up. It’s designed to make you quit.

AskHistorians has joined with thirty other research- and academia-focused subreddits to issue this statement condemning recent and ongoing efforts to undermine scholarly research and intellectual freedom in the United States. Please share widely! www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

Whenever the opportunity arises, I happily channel Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, as I did on my recent trip to the sublime Neah Bay.

I'm like a broken record on this, but this stuff needs to be stopped right now and it's of paramount importance. we are staring into the abyss of ethnic cleansing and mass murder in not too long at all. this cannot be come the new normal.

How AMAZING that I am a finalist for national awards in 2 different countries: my picture book DAS DORF DER STEIENE for the Schweizer Kinder- und Jugendbuchpreis in Switzerland & my translation of LETTERS IN CHARCOAL for the Carnegie Medal in Illustration in the UK. 😍😍 #kidlit #kidlituk #booksky

Outsiders. Rebels. Who doesn't love an underdog? Deep inside, most of us identify with those who are a little—or a lot—different. Sometime in our lives, we've felt like we didn't quite fit in. Forging your own way builds strength, and makes for a damn good story! storybundle.com/outcasts

Here's a question for science-fiction writers: are any of us addressing fictional science? We're going to be seeing lots more of this, since that is probably the 'research" that will now be getting the best funding in the US. future. (We're in Stalin-Lysenko territory now.)