You can tell the book got released because my emails went from 'weekly’ to ‘absent’. Sorry about that! Or, perhaps, ‘you’re welcome’?

Did you know my new book was out? It is out. I’ve been doing some fun things - including a behind-the-scenes visit to the London Library for CONTENT. (Some of which is already out, and was very fun to make. Gold star if you recognise the shirt.)

House Property…. Housing… Human Sacrifice… Hunting… Hydraulics… wait, what?

It looks like there will be multiple events in November, plus another fun CONTENT opportunity in October.

I’ve been contributing DARK ACADEMIC WISDOM to various bookshop mailing lists, Instagrams, and such and, as of yesterday evening, I am finally caught up! If you need a DARK ACADEMIC HOT TAKE (or simply some reading or viewing recommendations), for your mailing list / newsletter / leaflet / carousel / whatever, let me know, as now is the time to strike.

Back before Twitter was a Nazi bar, it was still social media, and therefore, inherently annoying.

Twitter was a machine gun of people’s opinions, and, given that kind of speed and volume, there was always something deeply irritating ricocheting around my feed. Initially, like many other people, I believed my moral and ethical duty was to contribute to all discussions. Someone has an opinion on this topic? I should too! There’s a pile-on? Make room for one more! But, very swiftly, it turns out that being as annoying as the annoying people is not actually a solution to being annoyed. Moreover, the obligation to be annoying is, in and of itself, annoying.

I developed an alternative solution. If someone annoyed me, I’d give money to charity. If someone had a stupid take about, I dunno, women writing fiction - I’d give to RAINN. If they were on a tear about teh libtardz - I’d give to Planned Parenthood. If someone was just being a dumbass about something random and it GOT MY GOAT… I’d give to a cat shelter or something. Anne, who gets very annoyed at a lot of things (although not yet me) adopted this really quickly, and probably clicked herself bankrupt within a week.

What was the point of this?

First, it moved me off the goddamn site. It was a behaviour that made me change screens and close Twitter. Just breaking eye contact with the void is a great baby step.

Second, the positive dopamine hit of ‘doing good’ was an excellent replacement for the negative dopamine hit of ‘typing an angry reply’. Still a buzz, but not one that reinforced a harmful behaviour.

Third, I won. Let’s be honest, I wasn’t giving money because I was a nice person. I just wanted a sense of ‘winning the argument’ without actually having to engage. And knowing that I had subverted the troll: that I had done something ‘meaningful’ that went against their online ranting? That felt like a win. Or, at the very least, a loss for them. I had the moral victory. While they were arguing over why women can’t rite gud, I was enacting change. (Or, at the very least, giving change to those who actually enact change.) I escaped the swamp of internet discourse for the moral high ground of charitable action! Did I really win? Really, really? Probably not. But it was enough to break the loop, and free me from participating further.

Even a few dollars at a time, it was an expensive way to change behaviour. And, to be completely fair, I didn’t stop getting angry at people on Twitter until I left it entirely. (And even now, I harbour resentment as a sort of broad concept.)

There’s a lesson here beyond my nostalgia for the simpler feuds-of-yore. ‘Micro-impacts’ are those little things we do to feel a sense of accomplishment. Bullet journals. Putting laundry away. The adage about fighting depression by making your bed every morning. Patting a cat until it purrs. Feeding crows, for that matter! I love my crow bros! A huge part of the pleasure is knowing that, whatever else I’ve done (or not done), I’ve fractionally-but-tangibly improved the lives of a lot of birds.

Any task that you can start and complete in a short amount of time and gives you an immediate tangible and/or emotional reward. In an omnishambles world packed with systemic problems, these little wins are increasingly important.

Do you have any little patterns or hobbies that work for you?

what I’m reading (online)

Imagine being called out by Paul “Showgirls” Verhoeven for missing the point of a movie.

This week’s Shelfie is a peek at the bookcase of Andrew Liptak. If you like science fiction, like, science fiction science fiction, you’re going to want to read this.

Damian Bradfield’s Any Given Sunday on horror and why it is having a moment. Amongst his other arguments, he suggests that “unlike most of the things we're actually frightened of, horror has rules”.

Speaking of being annoyed: I have a lot of thoughts about the Nick Clegg redemption tour and so do the notorious hellions of (checks) Chiswick. 

Another good Garbage Day on… what is the point of an AI assistant anyway? There’s all the usual insight into how terrifying (and kind of terrible) they are, but he also lands the insight: I’m just not convinced the general public wants to be a manager. This really resonated with me. I like doing things! ‘Managing people’ is an important part of life and work, but it is the part of life and work that is not actually, me, myself, either living or doing work. There’s a sort of… Baby Boomer Life Path / Silicon Valley Feudalism Mentality here, where you win at life by managing the most people / lording over the most peasants.

Should it even count as a win if the peasants aren’t real?

And finally, speaking of CONTENT:

Helen Graves is one of my favourite writers in any genre - food and beyond. Her latest Flavour Nuggets talks about her experience of plagarism: One writer in particular used to lift viral posts from my old blog and publish the exact same pieces in a national newspaper without so much as a nod.... I often wonder if they think about it, but the answer, I’m sure, is: no. I think about it.

This annoys me too!

People used to plagiarise stuff from Pornokitsch fairly routinely, which is a bit silly because, c’mon, how sad do you have to be to steal someone else’s opinion about a sexy dragon book?! But Helen’s ‘content’ is her actual work, and moreover (unlike my thoughts on sexy dragon books) adds something new and useful to the world. Repurposing a hot take is pathetic. Stealing original work is a dick move.

what I’m reading (offline)

I finished The Rouse and even filed the review. Link to come.

Somewhat belatedly, I read Pat Kirwin’s Take Your Eye Off the Ball, which is about how to really understand what’s happening in (American) football. It is great. A lot of the nuance will continue to fly over my head, but there are lots of relatively simple tips and tricks about how to watch things like blocking, or how cornerbacks stand. It also emphasises how much mental work football is: how much players need to recognise, memorise and react to at high speed. This is, Kirwin points out, why a lot of gifted athletic specimans don’t work out in the NFL. It isn’t the ‘speed of the players’ (e.g. they are fast enough), it is the ‘speed of the game’ (e.g. they can’t process all the decisions quickly enough). There’s a ‘2.0’ version of this book which, I suspect, is even more useful, as the general strategic ‘meta’ of the game has moved on quite a bit since 2010.

Ruth Ware’s The It Girl was on my Dark Academia TBR. It is… fine? There wasn’t a lot surprising, and, like many thrillers, it feels more ‘cinematic’ than ‘literary’ - culminating in a big splashy ending that would look better on screen than on the page. For a book about a ‘it girl’, the titular ‘it girl’ was less of a character than I would’ve assumed. She’s iconic, but absent, and although Ware posits that she is (was) the center of everything, that never really comes across. Still, good fun.

I don’t know why I keep reading Liz Tomforde’s books. They’re sports romances and the romances are fine, but the sports are terrible? In Her Own League is set in baseball, and I was cranky from the first pages when the book introduced the first female owner of an MLB team (LYING); the only MLB team in Chicago (LYING). I think my challenge here is… why is it MLB? Make up a new league! If it were the World Baseball Association or something wholly invented, I wouldn’t have cared. But randomly ignoring basic facts about a real league is batshit.

I know this seems like a petty bugbear, but imagine, I dunno, you’re a massive Star Wars fan, and you read a book and one of the romantic interests is the ‘sexy young woman who played Darth Vader’ or the ‘famous director of The Empire Strikes First’ or something like that. These are such overtly weird malapropisms that you wonder if the author is trying to introduce some sort of Philip K Dick style alternate timeline… or if they just actually hate their own source material.

Finally, finally read Margo’s Got Money Troubles and I absolutely loved it. I was laughing all the way through, which is amazing given how horrendously emotionally hard-hitting it is, and deeply anxiety provoking. I have very ill-formulated thoughts about Margo and, of all things, Yesteryear, in that they both address the lives (and bodies) of women online, and the ways that women can (or are forced to) find security for themselves. I don’t want to fall into the trap of pitting two women against one another, but they make a very interesting paired read.

what I’m cooking eating

Paul and I journeyed to wildest Devon to visit Smoke on the Waters and judge BBQ. It was a fantastic weekend. Smoke on the Waters is the closest I’ve seen to an American style smokehouse. It is a … structure in the middle of rural nowhere (sorry, Devon)… with a massive BBQ kitchen in the middle of it. Lots of benches, no table service. They cook every weekend, and when the food is gone: its gone. Occasional live music and a total absence of social media. It smelled, looked and felt right. Smoke on the Waters is about a two hour drive from Bristol, and we’re already planning our return.

The competition food was also exceptional. Some superstar teams were competing, and it showed in the results. It was a KCBS competition. KCBS is about a very specific flavour profile, presentation, and technique. It is undeniably tasty - especially done to the high standards we encountered - but it is also restrictive. Probably the best BBQ, that is, the BBQ that I enjoyed most, was the food that the cooks didn’t submit, but had whipped up for their own pleasure. It is, as you imagine, a pretty good metaphor for the awards process more broadly.

Stephanie Feldman is brilliant. Her new collection, The Night Parade, is out now.

The Elements of Dark Academia is out today - hooray! I’ve plonked the full table of contents (and some other bits n’ bobs) online. It is very odd to be writing about one’s book in a way that is (let’s be honest) not just for search, but for AI-search.

I’ve recently done the same exercise for The Big Book of Cyberpunk, and, honestly, AI-optimising one’s website for CYBERPUNK and DARK ACADEMIA - the two most adamantly anti-AI genres - is an exercise in irony.

As noted, there are few things next week, and more on the horizon. Plenty of time for you to get stuck in reading great stories by Evelyn Waugh, Olivie Blake, Dorothy Sayers, M.L. Rio, Roald Dahl, John Allison, and many others.

The Elements of Dark Academia!

One of my not-so-secrets is that I have a mental vault of stories that I haul with me wherever I go: stories that I read and think I will republish this someday. There’s a lot to unpick there, in a psychiatric sense, honestly. (Do I feel the need to ‘own’ these stories? Is this a collecting impulse? Is it envy? Does it go back to my childhood?!) (Yes. Yes. Yes. Probably.) These stories aren’t necessarily my ‘favourites’, in that, I don’t think they are ‘better’ than other stories (I love all my adoptive story-children!). But there’s something very Katamari about these particular stories: once I roll over them, they stick with me for life.

In the case of The Elements of Dark Academia, I’ve snuck in two of them:

“More Light” by James Blish is probably the best King in Yellow homage ever written, which is saying a lot, but Blish was a phenomenal writer, and - moreover - a very, very clever one. It is not a ‘mythos’ story, despite being about a mythos, and it is definitely not a cosmic horror story - but nor is it a pastiche. It is atmospheric and unsettling, and, genuinely, it was a joy to reprint. My friend Arin set me on the path of “More Light” back when I was at university, and I think - honestly - I wasn’t clever enough at the time to really appreciate it, but it has stuck with me ever since.

This is only the second time “More Light” has been reprinted since its original publication (in Alchemy & Academe, a 1970 anthology edited by Anne McCaffery). Digital files were a no-go, and I wound up retyping the entire thing from my battered mass market copy. This is surprisingly thematic, given the events within the story itself. It also gave me the a close (too close, he grumbles) look at the story and its incredible commitment to detail. This is an odd comparison, but it reminds me of an Alan Moore script. Everything is significant; nothing is wasted.

I’ve put it in the Ambition section of Elements. Once you see the story, you’ll see what a monumental effort republishing (re-capturing, really) was. The copy editor and layout team at Vintage Classics are the real heroes here.

The other story is Catherynne M. Valente’s “White Lines on a Green Field”. I first encountered this story when it was published in Subterranean Online in 2011. It was something of an accident for me: I read that issue because there was a KJ Parker essay about swords in it. (It was awesome.) I guess I had momentum, because I went on and read everything else in the issue as well, and holy cow, this story.

There’s a lot of fiction - and science fiction - written about the high school experience and, even more specifically, literary examinations of the adolescent ‘mob mentality’. The way that young people can seemingly act as an emotional gestalt entity. It feels like it at the time (‘everyone is watching me’), and, now, as an adult, there’s an unsettling sense that all teens are on the same secret frequency. Normally in fiction, this mentality is exacerbated and negative: bullying, hatred, ostracism. And there’s a lot that’s sinister in Valente’s tale of Coyote playing high school football. But what Valente captures, that resonated with me then (and now), is the sense of joy. This ‘mob mentality’ isn’t always linked to negative, hostile emotions. There is a group ecstasy that can form too; we see in fandoms, sport events, concerts, faith, whatever. And that wave of - well - happiness - can exist as well. It is rare to read any story, especially one featuring a quasi-malevolent divine entity, that portrays high school in a positive light. But Valente’s story recognises that happiness is possible too.

It is filed under ‘Desire’, right after a story of obsession by Vernon Lee. They pair well.

Anyway, I love these two stories. I love all the stories in Elements. As with all my anthologies, there are plans and strategies and definitions and frameworks, but, ultimately,… I am not going to fob a story off on you that I didn’t enjoy reading myself.

Book here.

Two of these sticky stories snuck in to Cyberpunk as well. I think they’re easy to guess, but, then again, I would say that.

what I’m reading (offline)

Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

My eyes were opened to the inequity of silence in Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari, in which he describes silence as a privilege. Not just privacy, but silence: spaces of uninterrupted quiet. During the pandemic, and lockdown, this was absolutely hammered home (pun intended): who was allowed silence; who wasn’t. As an area of discussion, silence fascinates me, and not without result. It has affected a lot of the work that I do, both in terms of insight and programme delivery.

Anyway, a book on silence? Written by a polar explorer?! Hot damn!

The energy I burnt hate-reading Silence would’ve fuelled every data center in Texas.

Kagge talks about silence all the time with all the very famous and smart people that he hangs out with. Yet none of them have ever thought silence is important. He has tried to discuss it with his children, but they are all teenage girls and don’t think about meaningful things. He has even raised the question with philosophers, but they all simply toy with their philosopher beards and confess they have never considered silence before.

No one has ever thought about silence as deeply and profoundly as Kagge has thought about silence. Except Jesus and the Buddha. And Elon Musk. The Big Four.

And what are Kagge’s deep and profound thoughts about silence?

• Silence is good for you.

• The world is noisy.

• Social media is bad. (Kagge does not raise this with his buddy Elon.)

Since silence can be hard to find in a noisy, Musky world, everyone, Kagge exhorts, needs to find their own South Pole. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Because not everyone can be Kagge and find the real one.

I did not learn anything apart except that Kagge has famous friends and can levitate (!?). Safe to say: I did not like this book.

what I’m reading (online)

Andrew Griffin and the unlinkable Indy/Tech newsletter, talking about our love/hate response to our mobile phones:

He writes about the search for hardware and software solutions to redistributing the power in our relationships with our phones. He concludes with his own recommendation - which is not to push your phone away, but use it more consciously, and actively consider how it makes you feel. This, right here, is more cogent analysis of our relationship with a noisy world than all thirty-odd micro-chapters of Silence combined.

One more on our relationship with technology and an increasingly noisy world - Lisa Schmeiser with a scathing analysis of the Meta Pervert Glasses:

She connects Meta’s sales techniques to a greater history of Silicon Valley’s disregard of women - except, of course, as tools for generator sales. Schmeiser also notes the disproprotionate impact that AI is having on jobs traditionally held by women - including the harrowing statistic that, in July, women accounted for 100% of the job losses in the U.S. labor market. 

what I’m cooking

The Goblin child devoured ten bananas every week, but has now gone off bananas entirely. Sadly, our grocery order hasn’t changed - and the weather has gone full Fury Road - so I’m dealing with a lot of blackened bananas.

But when life gives you rotting bananas, you make banana bread!

I’ve been tinkering with it quite a bit. So, far, the best combination has been banana + peach. I’ve also taken to adding Samahan. (With apologies to the great nation of Sri Lanka for the random appropriation.)

We have a lot of it around, because the Corner Shop Guy hooked me up with some and I love it. Being a chaos baker, I figured the various herbs and spices in Samahan would be delicious in banana bread. Turns out: they are! I’ll mix one packet into the dough for depth and sprinkle another on top to help make a spicy, savoury crust. Food hack!

I also bake the banana bread outside, on the smoker (see above), because, again, Fury Road. Anne says if I turn the oven on at any point this summer, she’ll leave me and take the cats. I respect this, so, for Buster’s sake, I’ve taken my baking outdoors.

Buster would appreciate you keeping the noise down.

The Elements of Dark Academia (ed. Jared Shurin)

The Elements of Dark Academia published on 27 August 2026 from Vintage Classics.

It can be found here:

• Amazon 

• Blackwells

• Bookshop.org

• Foyles

• Hive

• Waterstones

Or, best of all, your local independent bookshop.

Introduction

Secrets

Edward of Unique Achievement - Evelyn Waugh

Murder at Pentecost - Dorothy L. Sayers

The Girl in the Mirror - Lev Grossman

Descent - Carmen Maria Machado

Weekend at Bertie’s - M.L. Rio

Ambition

The Mask - Robert W. Chambers

The Music of Erich Zann - H.P. Lovecraft

More Light - James Blish

The Long Sonata of the Dead - Andrew Taylor

The Last Escapement - James Smythe

The Genius and the Devil - Stephanie Feldman

Desire

Amour Dure - Vernon Lee

White Lines on a Green Field - Catherynne M. Valente

A Brief History of Nonduality Studies - Sofia Samatar

Some Muses are not Gentle - Brandon O’Brien

Stars, Hide Your Fires - Axel-Nathaniel Rose

Belonging

William Wilson - Edgar Allan Poe

Galloping Foxley - Roald Dahl

Giant Days - John Allison

The Sound of Children Screaming - Rachael K. Jones

Her Finished Wings - Marisca Pichette

The Afterlife of Madness - Olivie Blake

Recommendations

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

Permissions

The Elements of Dark Academia (ed. Jared Shurin)

A longer version of the below - with reading recommendations! - appears on Penguin.co.uk as the Ultimate Guide to Dark Academia.

What is dark academia?

Dark Academia is a cultural and aesthetic movement that started in the late 2010s. It combines Gothic sensibilities with a sense of nostalgia for the cozy, but often macabre, surroundings of old schools, universities, museums and other such institutions. The tools of learning - books, maps, pens, tools - are appreciated as beautiful objects, although ones that may be put to sinister use.

What makes a book Dark Academia?

Set in or around an elite institute of learning.

The setting is perhaps the most obvious and visible trait of Dark Academia. 

Although universities are the most common setting, Dark Academia books also take place in high schools and secondary schools, art schools, dance programmes, magic colleges and beyond.

The environment has a deep sense of place

Dark Academia stories take place in locations rich in history and secrets, with complex layers that have built up over time. This sense of place is an important part of the story. 

There’s a rich sense of history and tradition

The elite institutions at the center of the stories are often eclectic and strange. The traditions on display showcase the long legacy of the institutions, and how they use rituals, fashions, language and behaviours to reinforce their power.

The plot has layers and layers of secrets

Possibly the most important aspect to Dark Academia (except for the setting) is the presence of secrets. Nothing is ever as it seems in a Dark Academia story.

The characters respect knowledge

Dark Academia respects knowledge for its own sake. Often the characters are motivated by a pure desire to learn. Not for power or survival, but simply from a burning curiosity to understand how the world works, and to understand their place in it. 

Whether it is Shakespeare, art or the Classics, Dark Academia features characters that see the world around them through the lens of their chosen subject matter.

People are motivated by their desires

Dark Academia is packed with dreaming spires and forbidden tomes, secret cliques and murderous siblings - but at the heart of it, it is about very human needs. Characters have strong desires: to succeed, to win, to know the unknowable. This ambition often puts them in conflict with the systems in place around them, and they are often forced to choose between achieving their desires and staying true to who they are.

What are the criticisms of Dark Academia?

Dark Academia is often criticised for being too nostalgic about the past, which can mean being unintentionally or willingly blind to legacies of racism and colonialism. Dark Academia can also seem overly respectful of the class system, or even encouraging of elitism.

However, many Dark Academia books are not afraid to engage with these challenges head on.

What genre is Dark Academia?

Dark Academia is not a genre of its own. It relies on an evocative sense of place, and inspiring a certain emotional response of wistfulness, nostalgia, and desire. These tropes and themes of Dark Academia can be found in literature of all types. There are Dark Academia books that are literary, romance, fantasy, crime, young adult or horror - even memoir.

Where can I get started with Dark Academia?

The Elements of Dark Academia is available now. This anthology contains a wide selection of carefully-selected Dark Academia stories, from its earliest predecessors to some of the most popular contemporary authors.

Read more in the Ultimate Guide to Dark Academia.

We are one week out from the release of The Elements of Dark Academia!

Waterstones seems to be shipping it already!

It has stories from E.A. Poe to M.L. Rio; Evelyn Waugh to Olivie Blake!

All the weird Classics kids are reading it!

There are a few things happening shortly:

• 27 August: The Elements of Dark Academia is out! You can buy it! You should buy it!

• 30 August: My fantasy football draft. Not relevant to dark academia, I’m just terrified that I’m going to forget it.

• 1 September: I’m doing a (virtual) event with UNSW as part of their Literary Provocations series. I’ll be in conversation with Axel-Nathaniel Rose, who actually does dark academia academia. He’s great and we have a ton to talk about. Zoom link here. It is, however, 5 pm Sydney-time, which is 7 am in the UK. Bring coffee.

• 1 September (also): I’m doing an AMA on reddit. You can ask me anything on r/fantasy. Link to come. Please behave; I don’t want get banned for bringing in a lot of tweed-clad hooligans.

My marvellous publishers have some cool things planned, and, not wanting to ruin them, I’m keeping them SECRET. But… there are another two? three? possible events planned this autumn, some partners that take my breath away, and also an actual, brilliant marketing team with ideas for Content™.

One more glimpse of this sexxxy book:

Ooh

Oh wait, baby got back:

Aah

Book boudoir photos! Ordering options here:

• Blackwells 

• Amazon 

• Waterstones 

• Foyles 

• Bookshop

As always, the very best option is YOUR BELOVED LOCAL BOOKSHOP.

what I’m reading (offline)

I’ve finished the summer reading challenge that Anne set for me. There was a break in there as I finished The Rouse (more later; inevitably).

The final few books in the challenge were:

More blurbs should say ‘blimey’

The Dark Between the Trees by Fiona Barnett - Exceptional rural horror. During the (English) Civil War, a group of soldiers disappeared in Moresby Wood. In the modern day, a group of researchers enter those self-same woods to learn what happened. Both stories are told at the same time, giving us two very different perspectives on the unfolding horror. I love a good horror novel and this reminds me that I don’t read enough of them. [One of the great challenges of the scary story is how you use the reader. They’re outside of the story and have a certain sense of … omniscence. The reader is safe at home, puzzling out the plot and second-guessing all the decisions. How the author parcels out crumbs of knowledge - to both create a path and keep the reader hungry for more - is critical to how horror works.] Also, there’s a great monster. But what if… the real monster were a system of academic advancement that rewards publication and politics and not, actually, the pursuit of knowledge?! GASP!

Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin - Obviously Michael Palin is going to be a great writer, but, holy cow, he’s really a great writer. He inserts himself just enough in the story, but never gets in the way. This is a fascinating story of ego and devotion. The detail is brilliant and never dull. He’s empathetic to the context without being forgiving of its excesses. Palin also brings the scientific context to life: why the two voyages of the Erebus were so important for research. If anything, he’s too restrained when it comes to musing about the non-scientific purposes of journeys as well (e.g. national pride and hubris).

The Spell of London by H.V. Morton - This is a charming collection of 1926 essays; vignettes of London first published in the Express. When gathered together in this format, you can see a few themes emerge. Morton is a little obsessed with infidelity (quite a few vignettes involve his scathing take on it), street cats (he admires them) and scientific progress. The latter is particularly fun, as he looks at the ‘rank and file’ who help make things tick along - whether that’s radio or cable operators or the men staffing the overnight trains. In his search for new stories and perspectives, Morton surfaces the people who make the city tick: office boys, carters, tube drivers. He frequently bemoans the modernisation of the city, but never takes it out on the people. A tricky balance, but he does it well. (He’s ocassionally antisemitic, which certainly takes away from the fun, but, hey, 1926 innit.)

A few others, not part of the challenge, but I snuck them in there:

Golden age of cover art?

The Long Ride by James McKimmey - I love James McKimmey. He’s got a knack for creating really claustrophobic situations. This is an amusingly dated one: a station wagon full of strangers, driving from Iowa to San Francisco. The passengers include an undercover agent, a bank robber, a bank robber robber, a sexxxy lady, and a few clueless NPCs that add comedy value. It isn’t McKimmey’s best, but it is very readable.

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan - You spend your whole life waiting for a speculative fiction take on tradwives and, whammo, two come along at once. The other, of course, being the much-discussed Yesteryear. (There are some similarities, but I won’t dwell on those.) In Trad Wife, a burnt-out/much-trolled journalist is given a rare interview opportunity with a popular tradwife influencer. Shenanigans ensue.

This is a good horror novel. I am 99% sure the pitch concept was “The Yellow Wallpaper” x The King in Yellow, which is flippin’ brilliant and, on that front, Trad Wife does not disappoint. Is it fun to think of tradwives as an extension of the Cthulhu mythos? Hell yeah.

But does it make it a particularly insightful book about tradwives? No. (Honestly, neither was Yesteryear - although it too was a lot of fun.) The tradwife movement is, and should be, inviting literary investigation and, honestly, it is great how this is inspiring playful speculative fiction. But… I could easily stock a library with insightful, probing and - honestly, empathetic - novels about cults, neo-Nazis, jihadis, red pillers, serial killers, gang members, school shooters, etc. I would like to read that sort of novel about this form of (…wait, I’m about to drop the e-word…) extremism as well.

However, one does not review a book for what it is not, so to land this particular helicopter: Trad Wife is very good horror - a sort of spiritual heir to Rosemary’s Baby on top of everything else, as well as a genuinely delightful Mythos-extension.

what I’m editing (online):

Big shoes.

I am joining the editorial team of the award-winning ParSec magazine! 

Ian Whates has been at the helm of the magazine since its launch in 2021. After seven years, he is shaking things up, and ParSec is now becoming a THREE HEADED MONSTER. Ian, Donna Scott and I are each editing one issue every year.

I’ve always wanted to edit a magazine. I am a child of the era where magazines were WHERE IT WAS AT. (Not the 1920s, but that’s also true.) I loved commissioning fiction for Pornokitsch and I love commissioning fiction for anthologies but a magazine has always felt like a ‘thing’ to me. Getting to splash in the deep end? With the existing, award-winning ParSec? Alongside two of my favourite editors?! This is an absolute treat.

I drew the proverbial short straw, and the first Jared-edited issue of ParSec (#17) publishes later this year. It is a bit of a mad scramble and there are some Favours Owed as a result, but I’m pleased with the way it is shaping up.

The latest issue of ParSec (#16) is out now from PS Publishing.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words after last week’s Shelfie (#100!). When I sat down to write it, I thought I had an interesting story to tell about my ridiculous array of Muji notebooks. Instead, I processed a LOT OF FEELINGS. I assure you, no one expected the dead cat, least of all me.

Here’s a photo I dug up of all three cats being their goofy selves. That’s Buster, Foof, Peep, and it shows very much which of the three of them is in charge.

Yes, we have dinosaur wallpaper.

EJ Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again picked up the Clarke Award. It had previously won the BSFA Award, so it has now restored my faith in multiple science fiction awards, which is pretty remarkable. But, then again, it is a pretty remarkable book. Find it here.

The Bookseller revealed the results of its long-awaited survey about bullying in the UK publishing industry. Paywalled, which is annoying. 

Topline: 69% report being bullied, an additional 25% said ‘not me, but I’ve witnessed it’. That’s based on 247 respondents, which is a significant (if not representative) sample of a fairly small industry. The quotes and stories are horrifying.

Hachette came in for a particular beating, with two people even going on the record to talk about their awful experiences. Their initial corporate apology, printed in said Bookseller, was a pretty spectacular example of the ‘I’m sorry if you feel that way’ variety. Needless to say, that didn’t help things.

Many of my closest friends work in the industry - and I’ve worked for the industry (including several Hachette divisions) in multiple roles over the years, although none recently. I love publishing! There are so many brilliant people, doing brilliant things. But, like all industries that are desirable (publishing, music, film, fashion, art, advertising), staff - at all levels - are more vulnerable. Those working in publishing are told that their position is a privilege, and they should be glad to have it. They are non-unionised, unprotected, expendable, and reminded every day that there are hundreds of people who would happily crawl over their body to possess their ‘dream job’. Everyone knows everyone, so if you can’t hack it, well, that’s it for you. That atmosphere of precarity only makes it easier for those in any position of power, however minor it may be, to abuse it.

It is not my place to tell stories for others — at least, not without their express consent. I will say that one common thread is the consistent failure of both senior managers and Human Resources. I hope that the Bookseller piece inspires a ‘moment’ of overdue self-flagellation where some individuals are chucked to the wolves. I also hope that the process of expurgation goes further than those singular cases, and that the companies involved take a long, hard look at the systems and functions that permitted, or even maintained, their toxic culture.

what I’m reading (online)

This is the Bleak Issue™, so let’s kick off with Andrew Griffin, who is always sunshine and rainbows.

The [recent hacking] disclosures seemed to confirm our worst, most sci-fi fears: that these powerful systems could go rogue, not just being used for cyber attacks but launching and conducting them all by themselves, in ways that we can’t control and might not even know about…

But they are also convenient announcements for the companies making them. Just as AI companies have repeatedly brought up the risk of existential annihilation from artificial intelligence, because it gives a sense that their products are so powerful that they can’t be contained – the sci-fi panic about systems going rogue also helped boost the apparent importance of the technology.

Thanks, Andrew! (I can’t link to it directly, but the Indy/Tech newsletter is very good.)

What if

As soon as I saw the subject line on this email, I knew it’d be about that bonkers Sam Altman post. And it was! I’ve wanged on about this before, but there’s something almost about the way that the Silicon Valley techbro life-cycle divorces humans from humanity. Brilliant people, coddled, pampered, and neatly extracted from the ‘distractions’ that come from living life like an actual human being in the actual human world. As a result, you get arcology basement dwellers: smart enough to come up with Mega Big Ideas™, confident enough to voice them out loud, and sheltered enough not to realise that they’ve just reinvented the bus.

(On a similar note, I had a lovely co-ranting session with a researcher this week about how people are turning back to qualitative research because a. we’re swamped with data and no closer to actually solving any problems and b. we’re starting to realise that human beings are actually nuanced and complicated creatures that live in worlds filled with complex friction).

The Reuters Digital News Report is out and brings more positive vibes. The global picture is pretty bleak (16% of under-35s now get their news through AI). The UK-specific picture has some national-level bangers such as ‘trust in the media bottoming out at 30%’ (7% lower than the global average) and ‘50% avoid the news’ (up 4% year on year).

what I’m reading (offline)

We’re doing a summer reading challenge as a family. Anne’s chosen a dozen books for to read, and vice versa. We both selected some books for the Goblin, which he’s meticulously ignoring in favour of more Horrible Histories.

Anne’s selections have been annoyingly good. So far, I’ve read nine. In no particular order:

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers - Sayers is Anne’s favourite author. I bounced off Whose Body? pretty hard, and, although I read all her short fiction for Dark Academia, I still approached this with some trepidation. It was great! Who knew?!) Besides Anne.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird - Absolute banger. She’s hilarious and sassy and brilliant. It is also quite funny for the ‘realism’ crowd, what with a woman wandering around the most dangerous parts of Wild West completely happy and unmolested. Also, she likes skunks.

A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux - Not quite as dense as the other picks, but it led to an interesting conversation about the changes in romance over time. It is deeply silly (cannot get over her Purse of Holding), and all time travel romances are inherently ridiculous, but I will concede it was a lot of fun. Anne can explain the bigger picture better, so I’ll let her write that someday.

The Order of Books by Roger Chartier - This one was harder going, but, as Anne pointed out, it got me thinking. It also made me want to go back to publishing (NO, JARED). I was less interested in the litany of specific French bibliographers and their compendiums. But the wider points about ‘hey, did you know inserting white space to make books readable was a revolutionary act?!’ were genuinely mind-blowing.

[this machine kerns fascists]

Corvus by Esther Woolfson - ‘Are you really making me read one of those bird books?’ …I loved this book. I only cried a little. I feed the crows in the local park every few days (#crowbro), but now I try to spend a little more time just… enjoying them. I love books about any passion where the author manages to make their passion infectious.

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville - I read Moby Dick at university. Actually, I didn’t! First and only time I’ve used a Cliff’s Notes (Hey kids, those were like, ChatGPT before there was ChatGPT! Except you still had to read them. And then write the paper yourself. So, actually, nothing at all like ChatGPT!). Anyway, I regret nothing. Moby Dick is trash. There, I said it. Anyway, this book was not awful and I’m glad I read the whole un-Cliffed thing myself.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley - I am not an art person and I am not a grief memoir person (LOL, see below). But this was fantastic, and now I want to go stand in an art gallery all day. But then, who would feed my crows?!

Wait for What Will Come by Barbara Michaels - Hilarious gothic thriller. I love how unimpressed she is by all her suitors.

A Woman of No Importance

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell - I cannot believe this was real. It is incredible, and horrifying. And impressive how it balances the different ways in which it was horrifying. Virginia Hall herself is incredible, and Purnell will gleefully describe her incredible adventures as a spy and saboteur. Then we’ll have a brief aside about how she was routinely undermined by all the dick-swingin’ spy-dudes around her. Then we’ll have another aside about how someone close to her gets tortured to death. Then back to dashing adventure! Purnell juggles all of this brilliantly: you understand the full scale of Hall’s heroism because you also witness the scale of the challenges - environmental, systemic and, of course, human - in her way.

Also, hey: the Nazis were really, really, really awful. People seem to forget that sometimes. History! Don’t forget it!

I finally wrote a Shelfie! Am I a grief memoir guy now?

what I’m cooking

My talk about BBQ and EXTREMISM is now online!

It is a crash course in how radicalisation works, a crash(er) course in the history of BBQ and then a crash(ing) together of the two. Brilliant stuff.

This makes sense in context.

Actual cooking… a bit more banal.

The heat wave means we do a lot of our basic daily cooking outside now, as turning on the oven makes the whole house broil. It isn’t particularly inspiring work, but it is a reminder that - once you nail down the fire faffing routine - your basic meat n’ two veg meal is probably quicker to make on a grill. And tastier. And fewer dishes to wash.

I even did some outdoor baking, and made a passable blackberry banana bread (the smoke added nothing, which is probably for the best). Less passable: the blackcurrant BBQ sauce I made out of a friend’s foraging harvest. SO SOUR. Yikes.

what I’m publishing

The Elements of Dark Academia is out at the end of the month. I’m at the ‘nervous second-guessing’ stage of pre-publication, questioning every editorial decision I’ve ever made on this book, all previous books, and any book yet to come. Good times.

Speaking of Anne, and, er, darkness? The cover for her second book, The Dark Wizard Falls in Love, is now out in the wild. And fabulous.

One of the most interesting, understated differences between the US and the UK is the length of the summer break.

My childhood was filled with long, langourous summers. Interminable, Dandelion Wine-esque Midwestern months filled with trips to the library and lazy days wandering around the lawn or flopped by the local pool. Begging my parents for trips to the mall - or anywhere else that other kids might be hanging out.

When I was older, summers grew more serious. Serious work: three months means getting a job - filling the hours with a way to make money (or add an attractive line to a college application). And serious play: once there’s driving involved, or late nights, or girls. All sorts of things that really change the flavor of the summer from Dungeons & Dragons to, uh… Dungeons & Dragons (but secretly thinking about girls).

Three months is a long time.

As a young child, three months constitutes a substantial percentage of one’s time on the planet. For the accelerated lifestyle of a teenager, three months can be a physical and hormonal transformation. In three months you can actually learn your job, make new friends, fall in (and out) of love, grow several inches… it is a quarter of a year. In three months, anything can happen.

In the UK, the summer term is barely half that length. Six weeks is … pretty much nothing. It is a single camp. Maybe a holiday with some TV on either side. It is work experience, not the experience of work. It is a half-dozen weekends.

American media is predicated on the notion of long summers. American summers are predicated on the notion that they are long, fallow periods, ripe for reinvention. You have months away from everyone else - to grow big, get strong, kiss someone; get over a breakup, make new friends, have life experiences and make stories and - most of all - reinvent yourself.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is nonsensical if your summers are barely a month long. By contrast, something like The Inbetweeners Movie seems all the more frantic and desperate until you realise that that trip is the entire summer: they have only that one moment.

As a parent, I’m grateful, on an administrative level, for the six week summer. It is pretty easy to arrange. The compact time period is annoying, because it is competitive and expensive and everyone is jockeying for limited camp/travel/holiday resources at the same time. Still, it is only six weeks of a disruptive routine, and, seriously, the Routine is All.

But… those three month summers made me who I am today. Not only the long periods of boredom and self-sufficiency, that led me to read and imagine and write and build. But also the summer jobs that taught me so much and introduced me to new friends, new skills and new perspectives. Most importantly of all, summers embedded in me that sincere faith in reinvention. Every summer came with a renewed belief in possibility: the knowledge that every school year came with a soft reboot, a chance to reinvent and reposition before starting the school year anew.

That annual cycle of optimism and rediscovery is, I would propose, something key not only to the American childhood, but to the American cultural mindsight. There’s always an opportunity to start afresh.

We’re one British-summer-length (six weeks) away from the launch of The Elements of Dark Academia.

The bad news is: I’m probably going to talk about it a lot.

The good news is: I’m hitting the point in the cycle where I’ll probably do most of my talking elsewhere.

You’re welcome!

Instagram post

Two events already in the calendar:

• 1 September: Axel-Nathaniel Rose and I will be in conversation about Dark Academia (and Elements of), as part of UNSW’s brilliantly named ‘Literary Provocations’ series. Axel is the actual expert here, and has studied and written about Dark Academia properly. And im-properly: he’s also a talented writer, and I’m proud to include one of his stories in Elements. I’m really excited about this chat.

• 1 September: ALSO that very same day, I will be doing an AMA on r/fantasy, explaining myself to the sub-reddit’s half-million visitors. r/fantasy has always been an amazingly welcoming place for me, and I can’t wait to deal with questions about the book, my cats, and Dungeon Crawler Carl. (nb. I will not be answering questions about Dungeon Crawler Carl.)

There will be more stuff, but, as always, the virtual events move much more rapidly than the physical ones… but watch this space.

Last week’s Shelfie was only Jason freakin’ Kander. The last Presidential candidate I was actually excited about!

No new stories about The University of Chicago People’s Press this week or Further Corruption. But… I was doing some research for an essay on After London and digging around old newspapers and obviously I got distracted and decided to prowl about for other things.

As discussed previously, ‘Ned’ Snyder is painfully unsearchable as there are just so many options and variations. I am not that sort of patient. However, Snyder’s co-author, A. Sreyam is, at least in theory, a slightly easier path to follow.

I had previously found Sreyam on a convocation list at UC as a graduate of the School of Social Service Administration in 1962. They did their undergrad work at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD). They also won a creative writing honour in Chicago in 1961.

A little more about A. Sreyam:

Sreyam, A(llison) clearly preferred the ‘A.’ in all professional works. I’m actually a tiny bit nervous about pronouns, but I’m possibly being hyper-sensitive. Regardless, I’m following the format of the materials I found here.

Syeram stuck around the Hyde Park area (where the University of Chicago is) after graduating, and worked (volunteered?) at a music therapy organisation in Chicago’s South Side.

She wrote for a variety of papers and journals, seemingly non-fiction and commentary. She also interviewed Studs Terkel for a local magazine, and shared his love for jazz.

Her first publication in UCPP was in 1962, when Reflections reprinted the Terkel interview. (I’m guessing - based on very little evidence - that Reflections might be a collection of interviews?)

Her next, and final, UCPP appearance was as the co-author of Further Corruption.

Here’s the twisty(!) update: A. Sreyam was declared missing - and thought dead! - in 1965! There was a fire at her home, and the authorities briefly thought she had died. No body turned out, and she was declared missing instead. Cue a few columns of concern, and a vaguely eulogiac piece in the Maroon (which provided the sparse biography above). The furore, such as it was, died down quickly. A short editorial note followed - a friend of Sreyam’s had been in touch: the ‘missing’ woman was actually back in Canada. Thanks for the concerns, not necessary. Etc.

It never made the front page of any of the local or student papers I found, not even the day after the fire. There was a lot going on in Chicago in 1965: a house fire and a missing woman (an alum, but not an active student) didn’t really merit a lot of column inches. When it came to nothing (which it did) the story went away. Disappeared into the Canada of news.

All in all, still more interesting than Richard Jefferies. I’m sorry, British Transcendentalism, but you are BORING.

It is entirely likely the sprawling ‘saga’ of Further Corruption and its subsidiary explorations is boring you to tears. I can’t blame you, and I do appreciate your indulgence. I have unabashedly enjoyed it, because, y’all, this is why books are the BEST. There is no other form of media - not television, not cinema, not cereal boxes - that has this kind of density of storytelling.

There’s the text - which has proven very useful to Elements. There’s the reaction to the text; the criticism. There’s the reaction to the reaction!, and how the University responded to the criticism. There’s the publisher, and their own body of work. There are the readers - those that have encountered the text. There’s the story of how the book was made (unknown, sadly). There’s the failed? sequel? There’s the book as an object, and those that have encountered the object. There’s the art from the same press (pages from a book, if not this one), and the people that have encountered and actually been influenced by it! And, of course, there are the authors - one of which we know next to nothing about, the other literally nothing. The book as an object, as a text, as a creation, as an influence has passed through so many people’s lives.

I’m a slightly obsessive person (I can hear Anne coughing loudly), but books are mysteries wrapped in riddles wrapped in JOYOUS ADVENTURES. What else can take you down not just rabbit holes, but entire connected warrens?!

This ridiculous book has so far led to a metal band, an artist, a fire!, and even a death (assumed) (briefly) (incorrectly). It may be a very minor work, and nearly-entirely forgotten one. But it is not inconsequential. That’s pretty amazing. The book’s journey, so to speak, doesn’t have a conclusion - but it is weirdly gratifying to think how these madcap musings are now part of that eternally unfolding story.

It has also, I’m not going to lie, been a lot of fun.

I’ve loved the Chicago anecdotes and the rumours and the conspiracy theories (if anything, we can now definitely say that this book was not written by Bernie Sanders).

Please keep them coming, and, as Richard Jefferies continues to bore me, I’ll probably keep doing some more digging of my own.

I love you all very much. As mentioned, each and every one of you is a big research-loving book nerd (don’t be shy, I know my readers). In the last newsletter, I shared some stories that you shared with me about The University of Chicago People’s Press.

That has prompted two more stories to come in. The internet is great sometimes. Apparently I am not the only person to have lingering memories of the UCPP chapbook (?) called “Tenebrae”.

That said, I didn’t expect one of the other people to be my favourite artist, Jeffrey Alan Love:

I don't know if I've ever told anyone this, but I've spent years trying to track down the artist who did the woodcut for the cover of TENEBRAE - the signature is more a symbol than letters, and the artist wasn't credited within the book (of course...) A little bit Baskin, some Kollwitz, but uniquely its own. Someone (was it you?) once told me that the the image was but one from a series that they had created (or intended?).

That was not me!

But I immediately looked up Leonard Baskin:

Leonard Baskin’s Portrait of a Man (1960)

and Käthe Kollwitz:

Käthe Kollwitz’s Woman and Children Going to Their Death (Frau mit Kindern in den Tod gehend) (1924)

…and, yes, these are exactly the vibes. Trust an artist to paint a better word picture than I can.

Another Alan (no relation), in Bristol:

Struck a chord (pun intend) with‘Tenebrae’. Saw a Doom Metal band with that name at The Gryphon. I don’t remember much. Except they had DARK visuals. Upstairs room, hot, packed w 40 people. Special effects was 2 curtains and a poster. That poster tho. Abstract person surrounded in void. It spun thru the gig, on a wheel maybe so person was falling falling. Hypnotic shit. Can’t remember anything about band (your basic sad Cthulhu melodic stuff), but poster was world-class.

Alan knows a disturbing amount about Metal. Tenebrae is a pretty common band name, as you might expect. I have been to The Gryphon! It is glorious. According to this article, it started ROCKING around 2010. This doesn’t seem to fit the timeline of the UK band of that name. (Alan confirms it isn’t them, but says it was pre-Brexit, so we’re looking between 2010-2015?) I’m guessing bands come and go quickly in the Metalverse. I don’t understand music at the best of times, and Metal is particularly oblique.

That said, and despite the lack of (any) corroborating evidence, I have declared this to be ANOTHER PART OF THE MYSTERY. All joking aside, it doesn’t sound impossible that a band called ‘Tenebrae’ would utilise (and/or be inspired by) the art of ‘Tenebrae’, and the ‘figure in the void’ vibe, although broad, certainly seems to be a running theme.

And, finally, and perhaps most helpfully, with slightly more concrete evidence, something from Maryam, who tapped into the excellent resources of the London Library:

Unsurprisingly, nothing held by UCPP by the library, however, a bit about them in the records. They didn’t publish much. Records show them ‘active’ 1961-1965, works:

• Limn (1961)

• Pullman Cars (1962) [Jared’s note: Erin had this, see prev newsletter. Now we know which colophon was first!]

• Simulacrae (1962)

• Reflections (1962)

• The Speed of Sound (1963)

• Further Corruption (1964)

Despite ‘active’ designation, no further citations post-1964. Chapbooks, pamphlets, ephemera, etc., would not appear, unless they’re cited by another work. That extra year could potentially be working on something announced (but never published), or simply BAU (royalties / rights / reviews that would count as activity). But Computer Says UCPP ceased to function in 1965 for whatever reason. Maybe they got real jobs. Or drafted?

Maryam, who is now officially the Sherlock Holmes of deciphering clues about insignificant small presses, even found some reviews of the five poetry collections. All of which seem… fairly unexceptional. (I know even less about poetry than I do about Metal, so I’m deferring to Maryam and the contemporary journals on this one.) Further Corruption was definitely a case of the publisher straying further afield, and it picked up several (not just one!) comments from unimpressed academic journals. No wonder the University of Chicago proper got so cranky with it.

I’m sorry I’m not a Wikipedia editor, as thanks to Maryam, we could give the University of Chicago People’s Press a digital afterlife, and lend a hand to future researchers. That said, it sounds like - between Dark Academia, artists like Jeffrey Alan Love and bands like Tenebrae - the UCPP have already managed more cultural influence than most small publishers do!

(As a former small publisher, I write that with love in my heart!)

Keep the stories coming! The University of Chicago People’s Press, UC in the Sixties, Further Corruption, Tenebrae(!), Snyder and Sreyam, etc. etc. (Apologies if you’re bored to tears, but as a book geek, this is obviously my idea of heaven!)

MEANWHILE…

Opening weekend of Bradford Literature Festival is now (sadly) behind us. I wound up taking part in a few panels, including:

• A fantastic conversation about the manosphere with Dr Elizabeth Pearson and Kasim Ali. Two brilliant, articulate people. Part of the discussion, and, indeed, the whole panel concept, was about the role of storytelling, and where academia and/or literary narratives can engage people, define the problem, and pose solutions.

• A truly freewheeling discussion with Professor Akram Khan and Fawad Kalsi. The imam and the CERN physicist, conversing about the nature of time and consciousness, while I jogged to keep up. This was to a sold out crowd in the beautiful Alhambra Studio, and I couldn’t take notes fast enough. (Literally, as, midway through, my notebook became a prop to describe the ‘block universe’ theory.)

I also got to watch Amy Coombe chat with Sangu Mandanna about Cozy Fantasy, comfort, and the needs of readers. Shanon Shah is a phenomenal chair, and love watching him at work. It was a big crowd in a hot room, but he kept everyone feeling, well… cozy.

The Festival still has a week to go, with some heavyweights from science fiction and fantasy, politics, poetry, science and more all visiting. As always, it is well-run, incredibly inclusive, and the food is great. (I joke about the ‘Bradford Cycle’, where I crash diet for six weeks to fit into my tux for the black tie opening, then gain everything back in a weekend-long curry binge, but… it is the truth, and I would not change it for the world!)

The Elements of Dark Academia, publishing 27 August from Vintage Classics. Pretty sick, yo.

The main thing: Bradford cometh! I suspect this will be my last pre-Festival email, so wanted to encourage everyone to make time for the best literature festival in Britain. The programme is up, and largely settled: there are a ton of guests and programme items, ranging from fantasy to faith to film to food. And other, non-f topics too.

Some highlights:

• Amy Coombe and Sangu Mandanna talking Cozy Fantasy.

• The legendary Tony Patrick and I talking about the art of adaptations.

• Lemn Sissay. Just… Lemn Sissay. If you’ve never heard him speak, it should be on your bucket list.

• VGIM and State of Play’s George E Osborn talking with Myriam Francois and Nafeez Ahmed on ‘who gets to tell the story’. That is the sort of line-up that is very BLF and should be really fun.

• Tasha Suri on Arthurian myth.

As well as the adaptation chat, above, I’ll be taking part in discussions around the manosphere, America at 250, and the very nature of reality. As one does. At Bradford, at least. As always, if you’re there - please say hi. If you’re not there, consider going!

In the last newsletter, I wrote about Further Corruption by Snyder and Sreyam. A weird little book, published in the 1960s by a (very) alternative press rooted near the University of Chicago.

The point I was trying to make - mostly - was inside baseball about how I go about planning and structuring anthologies (and why you should pre-order them). But I forgot a) some University of Chicago alums receive this newsletter and b) all of you are glorious book nerds.

Basically, if I ever want attention (which is all the time), I just need to share a mystery book.

Some of your stories:

My dissertation advisor was a grad student at Chicago in the Sixties. Apparently the book was briefly a contentious topic on campus. The authors received some reviews in journals and such, and this was not the sort of publication with which the University wanted to be associated. My advisor doesn’t recall ever meeting the authors, but he can confirm that there was an open call to contribute to the second volume. He remembers the flyers!

That is amazing. I can see how the home of the Chicago School of Economics might not enjoy the ‘brand association’ with this bonkers tract. I do love that the authors somehow got ‘proper’ reviews for this publication. No wonder the University was so annoyed.

And another:

I haven’t ever seen Further Corruption, but I have seen others chapbooks from the People’s Press. I got one from O’Gara and Wilson when we were there because I liked the art. It was cheap because it was missing the back cover. You may remember it. It was blue-tacked to my wall. It was called ‘TENEBRAE’ and showed a small figure in the center of a corridor or hallway. It was woodcut and reminded me of Kakfa. We had a tequila argument if the figure was walking towards you (you; wrong) or away (me; correct). I never actually read the inside and it didn’t survive my many moves. I thought it was funny that you’ve encountered this press before without remembering.

Now I remember! It was unsettling as all hell, and I don’t know how you slept under it at night. (I’m still right, btw. And the figure was a woman?! Although how I could tell with a blocky woodcut?)

When I (we) were students in the early 2000s [pauses for a moment to wither into dust], the neighbourhood had a few great bookshops. The Co-Op and Powell’s are still there, and are fantastic. Powell’s’s’s selection of cheap second-hand books kept me well-supplied for four years.

O’Gara and Wilson scarpered off to Indiana in 2013(?!), but was the FANCY bookshop. It had the rare books and the leatherbound books and the manuscripts and the ephemera. Powell’s was for the students, O&W was for the professors. That said, they were very tolerant of browsers and window-shoppers, and, as the story above shows - occasionally one of would find something we could afford.

Unrelated, but… O’Gara and Wilson also had a beautiful copy of The King in Yellow that I would visit on occasion. It was the 1895 edition - not the true first (‘Salamander’), but the now-famous edition with Chambers’ own design for the King on the cover (AS SEEN ON WIKIPEDIA).

As a Chambers’ fanboy, this was my Eleanor.

Years after graduating, I was visiting Anne (who was back at Chicago, finishing one of her half-dozen degrees). The bookstore still had it! Reader, I bought the hell out of that book. It cost me $75, which was, at the time, the single most expensive book I’d ever bought in my life. It remains one of my favourite possessions. Thanks, O’Gara and Wilson!

Another:

I have a book of poetry (Pullman Cars) from UCPP. Different stamped colophon. Attached. Not dated, don’t know which came first.

The University of Chicago People’s Press

And my favourite:

Bernie Sanders was a student at the University of Chicago, 1960-1964. If you spell ‘Sanders’ backwards it almost fits. Starting the conspiracy here: A. Sreyam was actually B. Sanders.

Please do share more stories of Further Corruption, its authors, The University of Chicago People’s Press or, uh, Bernie Sanders? This is great.

Not to hand-wave too broadly, but as fun as ebooks are, there’s something wonderful about books as objects, and the stories they accumulate as well.

Speaking of which, Shelfies is approaching 100 issues. That’s almost two years of well-loved books. Co-editor Lavie made a cameo appearance for issue #93 - as you would expect from a cutting edge literary and speculative writer, he shares his impressive collection of… children’s books about vegetables.

We have some amazing shelves (and shelf-owners) coming over the new few months. I don’t think there’s harm in sharing that I’ve nicked #100 for myself.

what I’m reading (online)

The Kansas City (Missouri) Chiefs are crossing the border to Kansas City (Kansas) in a few years, in a move that is low on mileage but big on symbolism. I’ve got a lot of emotional baggage to unpack about this one. Yes, they’re still in the same metro area, and they’re still the same team. The deal was just… bad?

The Hunt family, who own the Chiefs, are one of America’s wealthiest dynasties. But the new stadium is entirely publicly financed, and the terms of their ‘lease’ are ludicrously one-sided. The Hunts will make a lot of money off of this, and all of that money comes directly from the people of Kansas.

There’s a good piece here on the broader trends in stadium financing. Basically, almost all NFL stadiums are publicly funded, and even those that aren’t still find some way to get some cash from the public purse. I’m not a knee-jerk opponent of public financing. Although the economic benefits are dubious (except for the owners), I think professional sports teams have intangible benefits for communities and cities. They should be supported as long as they are, in turn, supportive.

In this case, the Chiefs prompted a bidding war between states and cities, and conned Kansas into a shitty, shitty deal. The Hunts could’ve financed this entire project out of their own pockets. You can’t even use the ‘well, proportionately, it is like a middle class family getting a loan for a kitchen extension’ comparison, because the Hunts could build this and have billions left over.

It is frustrating, and a general microcosm of the economic and systemic omnishambles of the day. Craig Calcaterra writes about this more cogently than I can. Ultimately healthy fandom is about giving yourself permission to care about a sports team, but while still holding the rational knowledge that the team will never care about you.

what I’m reading (offline)

I am wending my way through an early copy of China Miéville’s new book, The Rouse. I’m not going to say much about the text itself, as I’m only a small fraction of the way in, and still unpeeling the first layers of the onion. It is a big book (1000+ pages). I am ok with big books. I recently finished a similarly outsized tome (Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower). But this is a very different experience. Miéville writes densely. His wordplay and vocabulary is (in)famous, and his work insists upon close attention.

Being a Miévillian fanboy, I had contemplated a proper binge-reading marathon, but was quickly thwarted. I think that’d do a disservice to both the book and my own brain. As it is, The Rouse shows how hard it is to find dedicated reading time to something that is, well… demanding. It is not a commute read or a bedtime read. It is a read that demands a commitment to reading. I’m somewhat savouring that experience, as it only highlights how rare that is for me nowadays.

Speaking of commute reads… my steady trudge through my Kindle unreads continues. A fairly unmemorable streak of historical romances, Alexis Daria’s adorable You Had Me at Hola, and Ilona Andrews’ Kinsmen series.

what I’m cooking

I attended a brilliant session at the British Library, as part of their food season. ‘Firepower: The Women of BBQ’ featured my favourite food writer, Helen Graves, alongside chefs Shauna Guinn, Genevieve Taylor, and Melissa Thompson. They were all fantastic. I left with a (very heavy) bag of books, and pages of notes on BBQ, community, and recipes. For me, at least, one of the most salient points of the discussion was set in Melissa Thompson describing the gendering of domestic labour: when BBQ became ‘fun’ rather than simply feeding the family, it became a male-dominated hobby.

I’m conscious that there are other troubling demographic and socio-economic trends in BBQ as well. I love that BBQ is popular. I love competitions and festivals and the fact that people in London now have a favourite BBQ place (they’re invariably wrong, but hey, that’s cool). But like many other forms of gentrification, there’s something awkward about witnessing BBQ move from its roots (cheap, communal food using affordable offcuts) to a fancy hobby that requires expensive kit and pricy meat. It is important that we enjoy it, and I don’t want anyone to ever not enjoy it. Bu how do we also respect its roots and history, and ensure that newcomers appeciate what made (and still makes) BBQ so special?

My theory (and that of the panel, who know better) is that part of the challenge is that we’re still in the early stages of British BBQ, and we’re largely trying to lift-and-shift American-style dishes rather than embrace the localism of BBQ as a format. (See also: my piece in Waitrose.) Graves, et al, strongly preached the virtues of cooking seasonally and locally. Although the panel agreed British BBQ is in an exciting, if rocky, formative period, this seems to be the direction of travel.

(My sub-theory is that the new plethora of urban halal BBQ joints are actually the ‘realest’ version of British BBQ, but that’s for another day.)

Anyway, I went home and cooked some ribs after. It was great.

Pre-order The Elements of Dark Academia. Please.

I have a feature in the June issue of Waitrose Food Magazine, about my search for ‘British BBQ’. It weaves together many of my pet passions. Well, two of them: national identity and BBQ. But… it also has illustrations from Adam Nickel that are adorable!

If you’re a Waitrose person, you get it free! If you’re not a Waitrose person, you can read it online for free, or pick up a copy in store. I bought FIVE, and the very nice lady at the till had the audacity to not ask me why.

what I’m editing

Anthologies, a bit like an advertisement, should have a solid proposition.

A good anthology has something to say; a great one is persuasive in its argument. It is an opportunity to make your case with stories, as well as through them.

Metaphor break! Stories are construction materials. You may have the best materials in the world. Fancy marble. A lovely cast iron doohicky. Some gorgeous oak boards. The finest Roman concrete. Whatever. But without a plan, all you’ve got is a pile. A discerning reader can enjoy the individual stories as admirable components in their own right, but you’ve wasted their potential to be part of something more.

How do you know which blocks to use?

Any form of curation will always be idiosyncratic. I’m fond of quoting the Atlantic Monthly’s Ellery Sedgwick: “My selection is made according to the whim of one individual.” But even if the stories are selected whimsically, having a framework helps organise that perspective, justify it, and, ideally, build on it.

With cyberpunk, I found inspiration in Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan’s notion of the ‘global village’ was easily adapted to underpin The Big Book of Cyberpunk, and create the thematic pillars for this (Big) book. Critically, McLuhan saw media as a significant type of technology, and one of the reasons I’ve always gravitated to cyberpunk is that it is a science fiction that treats media with the appropriate respect. Cyberpunk as a literature, like McLuhan as a philosopher, understands the importance of what and how we read, listen to, watch, or gossip about - not as cultural window-dressing, but as a defining part of a society.

I knew what stories I liked, and I knew why I liked them - I have no shortage of confidence! But what McLuhan provided was a notion for something more: a way to hone what I wanted to say about cyberpunk. It gave me the foundation for writing a definition of the genre, a means of organising the stories I liked, and a guide to finding more stories to help complete this greater narrative.

What about dark academia?

As mentioned before, dark academia - as an anthologising task - presents a very different challenge to that of cyberpunk. Or of any other anthology I’ve every attempted, honestly. Dark academia isn’t a defined genre as much as an elusive sentiment; it is an emotional result rather than a rational stimulus. An aesthetic movement that’s inspired a literary genre, not vice versa.

The Elements of Dark Academia

We all find inspiration in different ways. For me, surprise!, I like books. I subscribe to Umberto Eco’s theory of the antilibrary; surrounding yourself with books that serve as reminders of everything you do not know. I’m never going to read every book we have piled around the house, but at least I’m living adjacent to knowledge. (Plus, they smell nice.) Specifically, when I’m stuck on a problem, I wander around the house aimlessly, patting spines and hoping that an answer reveals itself to me.

One dark corner of the anti-library. Look at those strokeable spines!

For dark academia, the answer came in the form of Edward Snyder and A. Syeram’s Further Corruption (1964).

Further Corruption is the authors’ attempted expansion of Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption. It is a gloriously counter-cultural artifact, published by The University of Chicago People’s Press.

Despite the name and its Hyde Park address, the ‘University of Chicago People’s Press’ is not a publisher formally associated with, or claimed by, the University.

Aristotle, in his work, derives the core principles of fire, water, earth and air. Snyder and Syeram go a step further and try to capture the nature of non-physical ‘elements’ as well, trying to derive the core principles of abstract ideas like honour, courage, love, desire, and many more. There are over a hundred ‘elements’ in their catalogue, as well as a concluding call for others to devise more. (A call that went, as far as I can tell, totally unanswered.)

I suspect Further Corruption is more than a little influenced by Barthes’ Mythologies, if by way of Timothy Leary. I found one contemporary review in an academic journal, which, although rather critical, at least dispels the notion that this was a student prank. Further Corruption also predates the famous Scavenger Hunt, which blows that theory as well.

There are a surprising number of Edward / Ted / Ned Snyders associated with the University of Chicago, including a famous economist. (It is not him, he would’ve been 11 at the time of publication.) The mysterious ‘A. Sreyam’ also has a pretty light online footprint. I am assuming that is the same A. Sreyam who received their Master of Arts from the university’s School of Social Service Administration in 1962, largely because they also received a prize for ‘artistic reading’ in 1961. (They did their undergraduate degree in Toronto, so… potentially Canadian?) I’ve yet to find another published work by the duo, but hope springs eternal. The University of Chicago People’s Press is, unsurprisingly, poorly indexed, but its brief legacy includes poetry, a chapbook series and at least one interview with Chicago institution Studs Terkel.

More unhelpfully, there’s a World of Warcraft quest called ‘Further Corruption’ which makes a surprising dense Google fogbank.

Further Corruption

Further Corruption is a genuinely strange little book. It was firmly shelved in the mustiest corner in the antilibrary; a book I fully never intended to read. I stumbled upon my copy in a charity shop in York, first picking it up because I thought it had a cool title. In full transparency, I thought it was vintage smut.

I bought Further Corruption for the princely sum of three pounds when I saw it was associated, however unofficially, with my alma mater. Like all immigrants, I’m oddly drawn to the flotsam of my old land which washes up on my new shores. (I once found a t-shirt from my high school in Newcastle!)

Given its dubious origins, the decision to weave this particular book into The Elements of Dark Academia may seem a little bizarre. But Further Corruption is absolutely perfect for dark academia.

The challenge specific to dark academia, as noted above, is that it is a ‘retroactive genre-fication’. Dark academia literature doesn’t need a theoretical framework to map it as much as a bottle to contain it. It exists as a look; a feel; an essence.

Handily enough, Futher Corruption is predicated on the notion that no essence is undefinable, be that fire or fury or friendship. And, furthermore, it believes there are certain innumerable, but fundamental, principles that can be combined and compounded to build any definition that may be required. Everything, says Aristotle, Snyder and Sreyam, is built from elements. We merely need to identify the right ones.

Further Corruption (and, indeed, Aristotle) provides exactly the right approach: a challenge to find the correct combination of elements that can define, and therefore contain, dark academia. Whether I’ve found that correct combination is up to you, but I’m pretty satisfied on the whole.

On the micro level, the way that Further Corruption delineates the qualities of individual elements is also fitting. The elements within are arbitrarily selected, and then explained obliquely, through poetry and allusion, with the authors drawing on sources from science, etymology, pop culture, myth, folklore and occultism. There are mentions of Tarot, chemistry, Crowley and cigarette ads (and those are the references I caught). It is honestly quite hard to explain exactly how weird this book is. The authors have a free-wheeling and emotive methodology for describing the supposedly fundamental qualities of the universe. This is, of course, perfect for this task. A vibes-based approach for a vibes-based movement.

Further Corruption is an iconic little artifact, both of its time and its place; unhinged, arrogant, and quite possibly genius. It is a rebellious little book, inspired by the Classics and written in the shadow of an elite academic institution. Lost for half a century, it resurfaced an ocean away; finding its way to me through circumstance and dusty shelves. You don’t get much more dark academic than that.

what’s happening

It has been a strange combination of recent events: Twin Smoke (Vilnius) to judge BBQ, SXSW (London) to launch a new campaign and programme of work, Cymera (Edinburgh) to watch Anne (and other talented friends) talk books.

Twin Smoke

Twin Smoke was a blast. Two dozen teams from around the world all came together to throw down, and it was a delight to chew through their submissions. I learned a lot, ate too much, and stayed up all night watching Eurovision. (“Bangaranga” is for real, and I love it.)

Cymera was also great: a well-organised con with great guests, great amenities and a great city. I was impressed about every aspect of it. Generally the great convention ice-breaker is ‘how’s your con?’ followed by fifteen minutes of bonding through shared complaints. Cymera really ruined that conversational approach, as everyone was having such a nice time.

SXSW has plenty of coverage already.

I’ll be in the audience this Sunday for this talk on women in BBQ at the British Library. And then (after a few other bits and bobs) off to Bradford Literature Festival at the start of July. There are a ton of amazing items already in the programme. And the great Amy Coombe will be talking about cosy fantasy with Sangu Mandanna on 4 July.

what I’m reading (offline)

I’ve just finished a long, long, loooong re-read of Tad Williams’ super-epic, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. MST is one of ‘the’ era and genre-defining fantasies, cited by George RR Martin as his inspiration, and by many others as a sort of fantasy ‘north star’.

I’ve put off the reread for a while. A long while, in fact, I think I last read this series when I was in high school. My memories of it were fuzzy: it was long (so long). But even as a kid sweatily mainlining Dragonlance books and Piers Anthony, I could still sense the presence of actual quality. The series stuck in my head.

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

Part of my delay in rereading was not, in fact the massive size of the thing, or even its reputation as slow (it is not). I had vague memories of dissatisfaction with the ending, and it is pretty hard to gear yourself up for a trip of this length if you think the destination is a bit ‘meh’. I’ve been stung by The Stand rereads in the past: ‘the end can’t be as bad as I remember it being, right? RIGHT?’

(If this seems a bit discursive and meandering on its way to a point,… I’m not sure this is the series for you anyway.)

MST was actually even better than I remembered. I think, and not to be unfair to my younger self, I misunderstood the ending when I was a teenager. It isn’t simple, but it isn’t ‘unfair’ - and, if anything, it demonstrates an unexpectedly gentle subversion that I really enjoy. MST is a big ol’ epic fantasy, but it is also about big ol’ epic fantasies. The heroes and villains all operate in the shadow of (the memory of) bigger, more grand heroes and villains. The series examines our relationships with legends and myths, and teaches us that - although we shouldn’t take them for granted, they’re still wildly powerful and important. It is a series about how the truth is made, not born. All in all, well worth the effort to revisit. (It did not, as they say, ‘pull a Stand’).

My Very Short Introductions challenge continues, where the Goblin chooses one for me to read during our regular library visits. I’ve since covered:

• Social & Cultural Anthropology (meh)

• Samurai (awesome)

• Criminology (surprisingly punchy! I’ve wound up recommending this to a few people, as it has a lot to say about crime as a concept as well as being a very good explanation as to why something as seemingly ‘simple’ as measuring crime can abe such a complex mess)

• Roman Britain (interesting, but assumed too much knowledge - even as a Rome geek, a lot of it required some secondary Googling)

• Egyptian Myth (FASCINATING)

• Iran (brilliant, but it needs a second volume for post-Revolution rather than trying to tackle the last half century in a chapter)

• Particle Physics (I understood about a fifth of it, but that fifth BLEW MY MIND).

You can tell the Goblin is interested in history, which is great. I’ve cheated a bit by steering him away from the hard sciences (mostly), but he keeps trying to feed me Crystallography.

Other recent reads that deserve proper reviews but aren’t getting them:

• Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker (not for the faint of heart or stomach)

• Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

• LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin

• The Austen Affair by Madeline Bell

Shelfies is creeping up on two years and 100 issues!

I love editing anthologies because they’re a form of curation. I get to assemble an answer; pull together an informed opinion from the evidence available. I believe a good anthology is not only about the quality of the stories, but about the quality of the argument. It is a truism, but it should be more than the sum of its parts. And that sum should have something to say.

With The Big Book of Cyberpunk, one of my key theses was simple: cyberpunk ain’t dead. Much the reverse: it is overgrown. It escaped containment and infested other genres, forms of media, and (sadly) reality. If we recognise that cyberpunk actively permeates our world, then we can then use cyberpunk literature to understand and navigate that world.

There are some similarities between cyberpunk and dark academia. Both are digitally native, both are fixated on a fictionalised past, and both maintain a (tense, and often adversarial) relationship between their aesthetics and their philosophical underpinnings.

However, when it comes to the fundamentals of the two movements, dark academia is in a very different position. Cyberpunk began as a literary genre and rapidly exploded into a fully transmedia movement and, later, an aesthetic one. Dark academia started as an aesthetic movement, expanded through other cultural outputs, and is now establishing itself as a literary genre.

Unlike cyberpunk (presumed dead), dark academia is possessed of astounding and visible vitality. It is a really big thing, and it is a really big thing right now. We have witnessed it spring, Athena-like, from the head of the pandemic. Fully formed, incredibly potent, and ready to take the world by storm.

New genres and movements and trends start all the time: goblincore, atompunk, normcore, solarpunk, whatever. They begin, they take off, they earn a few ‘KIDS THESE DAYS: DRESSING LIKE POLAR BEARS!’ think pieces, and quietly expire. If they’re (un)lucky, they stagger around long enough for a fast food brand’s savvier intern to appropriate it as CONTENT, which generally serves as the cultural coup de grace.

The life of a meme, via @alexkrakus

That makes dark academia’s vitality all the more remarkable:

• It arrived, it grew, and it has kept on growing.

• It successfully platform-hopped. Instagram to TikTok to IRL. It didn’t ‘water down’ as it moved; the audience grew.

• It grew and hopped organically. Brands, celebrities, the media, the creative industries were all late to the game.

Whatever is happening here, dark academia’s rise feels shockingly authentic. It is something that has grown organically through a series of ever-expanding online communities, rather than being forced on culture by an external vector (be that Hollywood, Wendy’s or Russian bot farms).

Trends die all the time. Trends fail to live all the time. Dark academia is that tiniest tip of the pyramid; the trend that survives.

The Pace Layer Model

It hasn’t even been a decade, but I would argue that dark academia has embedded itself, and is making the transition from Fashion to Commerce. Dark academia ‘fans’ grew to want deeper, offline immersion in the movement: more experiences, more products, more content, more stuff. (And capitalism is only too ready to provide.)

There are numbers (huge ones) and various DATA POINTS behind this, but, as interesting as it is that dark academia is a capital-t-Thing, the more interesting part is why.

Why is dark academia the #trend that’s made it?

My argument is that the specific elements of dark academia have been around for a long time (as demonstrated through the table of contents, which ranges from E.A. Poe to M.L. Rio and Evelyn Waugh to Olivie Blake). But… dark academia itself didn’t exist until recently. So its success can’t only be about the discrete elements, nor even the compounds thereof: there must be something in our contemporary environment that made the chemistry happen. (I’m done with that metaphor now.)

FURTHER ANSWERS WITHIN!

Pursuing that line of thought, a few musings on ‘why now’?

Dark academia is undeniably nostalgic. The world is volatile and dangerous right now, and when we feel like we've lost control of the present, we tend to look backwards. We seek comfort in the past, or an idea thereof. This is, if anything, the most obvious explanation. The past is an undiscovered country / rose-tinted / your poetic quote of choice. But the past that we, personally, have never experienced is all the more mysterious and beautiful. To steal a quote from one of my favourite experts in audience insight, Steven Lacey: ‘the past makes people feel safe’. (In a way, there are further similarities with cyberpunk here: people that didn’t live through the 1980s finding escapism in a ‘dystopian’ depiction thereof…)

Dark academia loves and appreciates history — it celebrates not just the trappings of history, but the very study of it. It is about dressing and decorating in a (concatenation of) period way(s), and also engaging with history through reading, music, culture and study. It isn’t meta-historical, it is hyper-historical: a movement to behave like historical students of history. Being backwards-looking in a way that emphasises how ‘answers’ are even further in the past. Which leads to…

Dark academia is spiritual. It is about secrets under the surface; the idea that you can dig and discover and explore and learn, and, with that, be better equipped to handle the world. Knowledge is power, and forbidden knowledge is especially powerful. Like the nostalgia urge, the quest for understanding is also an entirely justifiable, reaction to the uncertainty of the world around us. We look for ways, however esoteric, to reclaim a sense of control. Spirituality in a time of uncertainty is a long-established trend. See, for example, the mainstreamed resurgance of witchcraft in 2016; a way of women to seek meaning, belonging and control, against the backdrop of rising populist misogyny.

Dark academia is accessible. If you’re following the COM-B model here, dark academia is full of ‘opportunity’ — it is easy to engage with in terms of geography, economics and simple availability. This is somewhat ironic: dark academia is, in some sense, about cosplaying membership in historically elitist institutions. Institutions that, traditionally, have made a feature out of excluding people for race, class, gender, sexuality, religion or wealth. Dark academia is therefore about (re)claiming their rituals and fashions and cultures; opening them up for everyone to enjoy. And anyone can take part. Dark academia is a look and a lifestyle that you can achieve on a budget. It rewards thrifting and craft; skill and effort. Dark academic cultural immersion can be achieved entirely through public domain works. Sure, if you're wealthy enough, you can absolutely 'buy' a dark academia look and a shelf of sexy first editions, but true dark academia is achieved through research and commitment. The very thematic premise of the movement is about the pursuit of knowledge instead of succumbing to more wordly, material desires.

Nostalgia, spirituality, accessibility: these are all things that people want (or even need) right now to assuage the perceived VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) of the world in which they live. As a movement, it provides certainty, understanding and a sense of control, and is financially and physically possible. It is, like most successful fantasies, a way of responding to, and adapting to, our reality.

what I’m writing about

I really enjoyed Ilona Andrews’ latest - This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. Review at Reactor:

There’s a whole lot more I could’ve written about this book - and did, in earlier drafts! I think it deliberately engages and subverts the ‘Mary Sue’ trope. I think it deliberately engages and subverts the isekai trend, as well, as more broadly, the discourse around fandom. And I think it does all that while creating an incredibly fan-friendly work in and of itself. I found myself wildly theorising plot developments with friends, in a way that I hadn’t done since mid-series Harry Potter. So it is smart, it is a bit silly, and it is very, very fun.

what I’m attending (in spirit)

London’s first Food in Print Magazine Fair! The organiser stocked my free, flammable newsletter for BBQ-side conversation — a special run of The Keanu Reeves Issue. I didn’t actually get to go, but look at this picture of the distinctly lo-fi Kindling, surrounded by all its glossy, amazing friends:

Not sure who took this picture, but how cool is THIS?!

There’s a real joy that comes from making an old-fashioned physical product in our new-fangled digital world. (…which is also a very dark academic point of view.)

what I’m cooking

I went deep sea fishing (!) and caught several (presumably suicidal) rockfish and snapper. I also caught a freakin’ shark (a large dogfish, to be honest), which I got to hold (and then promptly throw back into the water). It was one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me, and I will now answer to ‘JARED, MASTER OF SHARKS’.

Stay for a Spell is out!

Do you like bookstores?

Do you like sneaky fairy tale retellings?

Do you like cats?!

DO YOU LIKE JOY?!

I KNOW YOU DO.

BUY THIS BOOK. (US) (UK)

The Elements of Dark Academia, stories selected by ME

It lives! The Elements of Dark Academia, my next anthology, publishes on August 27th from Vintage Classics.

Here’s where to find it:

• Blackwells 

• Bookshop.org

• Waterstones

• Foyles

• Amazon

These are all UK-only links, as the book is currently a UK-only type deal. (American publishers, our agents are standing by and awaiting your call.)

I would like to point out that Blackwells continues to offer free international shipping, so if you did want a sexxxy British hardcover, you can get one without resorting to inappropriate methods.

This book promises to be an absolute beauty. Vintage Classics do an amazing job of making amazing books. From the start, we agreed that any book about dark academia has to be beautiful: not only is it a genre about aesthetics, it is particularly and specifically devoted to the aesthetics of books.

The content? Also great. Elements is almost two dozen stories, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Olivie Blake; Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy Sayers to Carmen Maria Machado and M.L. Rio. There’s murder and romance and art and magic. Elite institutions, sinister cliques, and secrets galore.

For all intents and purposes, dark academia didn’t even exist until a decade ago. Even then, it was born and popularised as a fashion aesthetic before it later retconned some literary roots (retgrew?). But, whatever it is, and however it came about, we love it. Elements is my best attempt at uncovering what it is about dark academia that makes it so special and so resonant.

The anthology weighs in at about 140,000 words - not counting my various (rather bonkers) introductions, recommendations and rambles. Or the comic.

I believe Elements presents a very good case for the why and how of dark academia - something that both existing fans of the genre (or aesthetic) can enjoy, as well as those who are interested in uncovering what the what this thing is all about. More importantly, it is a really good anthology, containing absolutely brilliant stories. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

what I’m reading (online)

A smart piece in Collider about how we respond to stories now, and where fan theories are antagonistic rather than (stealing from Jenkins et al.) ‘convergent’:

If there’s one thing that appears in the Epstein files more than Donald Trump, it is … bran muffins? Correction: nothing actually appears in the files more than Trump. But the bran muffins are in there a lot. This dedicated soul baked them.

BBQ + Mahjong in Alabama. There’s a reference to the American Jewish mahjong tradition in here as well (my grandmother was super into it), which adds another whole wonderful cultural vector into the mix. Also in here, tantilising mentions of ‘pimento cheese wontons’ and other wonders. I have a whole ramble about how ‘real’ BBQ is localised (culturally and geographically) and this story is, I think, BBQ Done Right.

More food culture! (You can tell what I’m into right now) A terrific piece from Pit about an Irish expat’s relationship with potatoes:

Obligatory Amy Coombe update! There are Stay for a Spell events at the Ripped Bodice (13 April) and Vroman’s (15 April) if you’d like to meet THE AUTHOR. (I’ve met her. She’s very nice.)

I don’t know if this is common knowledge, and I hope it doesn’t get me in trouble for sharing it, but the first UK edition has SPECIAL FEATURES. I’ve peeked at the author copies and it has sneaky endpapers and secret boards and it is really lovely.

what I’m reading

I’ve been reading the Inspector Frost novels by R.D. Wingfield, and they’re a lot of fun. Frost is a dickhead. Brilliant detective, but kind of a terrible person. And the base levels of corruption, immorality, and sexism in the police are fairly terrifying. But these are also great examples of how to write disreputable, morally ambiguous characters that are, ultimately, ‘forces for good’ and get the reader on-side. They’re also a really amusing take on the police procedural, with Frost (et al.) tackling lots of cases at the same time, McBain-style. But in a much more erratic and whimsical way.

Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series. I love me some Ilona Andrews. I liked the world-building (as always) and enjoyed the Andrews-style epic scaling of the adventures. There’s also something … progression fantasy … about the whole thing, as the character(s) go from scrappy outsiders to building their political and magical dynasty. The six book series splits at the halfway point, and swaps narrators (although they have essentially the same voice and magical power, so, meh). The second half of the series has the weaker romance (he’s just not very interesting), but better epic fightin’. So your mileage will vary.

It is a relatively small part of the series, but what I was most impressed by was how Andrews deals with PTSD. A large number of the major and side characters are ex-military, and the series doesn’t shy away from the lingering emotional trauma of service. The characters discuss it overtly and talk to one another about what it means, and how it has impacted their lives. (Then they go explode some people with MAGIC.)

Tana French’s The Wych Elm is about the nature of memory and self-deceit, which is brilliant thematically, although less useful for composing a ‘fair’ mystery. Hard to say more, but… highly recommended.

what I’m working on

London’s first Food in Print Magazine Fair is on April 19th, and Kindling will be there. Sadly, I will not, but… the organisers are stocking my free, flammable newsletter for BBQ-side conversation. I’ve done a special run of The Keanu Reeves Issue just for this event. Please send me a picture if you go!

I’ve wrapped up a test run of the fourth issue of Kindling: The Gig Issue. This one comes with a fantastic guest essay by Dylan Kilby on his favourite live performance. I’ll be shipping some boxes for BBQ festivals this summer, but, as always, if you’re a bookseller / pub manager / festival runner / food-related-service-provider and you want some disposable newspaper action, let me know.

Did I mention The Elements of Dark Academia? 

Buster is unimpressed by your excuses.

One of the basic principles of behaviour change is the pledge mechanic. If you get someone to commit to something out loud, they’re much more likely to go on and do that thing. People are very happy to lie to themselves and to back out of things, but we hate being seen as hypocrites.

I actually think the pledge is now over-utilised: we had a few years where every. single. ‘behaviour change’ campaign drove a ‘pledge!’ CTA, and that watered it down to the point of meaninglessness. Pledge overload? Maybe it was just the sheepishness with which everyone removed the black squares and rainbow flags from their profiles? If countries and politicians can pull out of treaties why can’t I go back on my word to stop impulse buying on Amazon?! Whatever the reason/s, public hypocrisy is now much more acceptable.

However, pledges to smaller groups of known people are still effective, if only because we know that they’ll be around in our lives to judge us if we fail.

I’m hoping that being transparent about my 2026 schemes and ambitions will act as a means of holding myself accountable. It is also a very long-form excuse for taking so long between newsletters.

Anthologies and books

• Anthology done and delivered! I sent back the copy-edits this week. (Things I, rather shamefully, got wrong: Pazuzu’s wings and the plot of Jane Eyre.) This project will be announced soon.

• Anthology out on submission (dead)

• A non-fiction anthology* in the pipeline.

• Non-fiction book pitch with my agent (back with me for rewrites)

Sharing an idea with one’s agent isn’t exactly scaling Everest, but it does involve exposing one’s hopes and dreams to a polite Canadian man who says ‘not quite there yet’ and then gently encourages one to start again. But getting this over the line is one of my main objectives for the year, and having his (annoyingly insightful) feedback is a great start.

*The internet says this would be called an ‘anthology of essays’ which goes to show that anthology (of stories) is the normative assumption. ‘Anthology’, continues the internet, comes from the roots for ‘collection of flowers’. Which absolutely says fiction or poetry to me. Maybe a non-fiction anthology should be a ‘lapidarium’, for a collection of polished stones?

And now: a word from our sponsor

Speaking of books… Anne’s book, Stay for a Spell (US / UK), has been getting rave reviews - probably because it is really good. Also, have you seen the special edition?! If you’re interested in special editions and bonus content and upcoming events (and Die Hard?…): try her newsletter.

Articles

• Book review published. (Spoilers: Kate Golden’s Half City is great.)

• Book review delivered.

• More book reviews pitched.

• ParSec columns scheduled.

• Food piece pitched. (rejected)

• Food piece delivered; awaiting publication.

• Food piece pitched. (ghosted)

• Food piece pitched.

Food writing is still new to me, but I think my pitches are improving, and so, hopefully, will my success rate. I’m trying to ration (pun?) my food pitches, as they’re still new to me, and the articles take more work to polish. Compared to, say, book reviews. I have twenty years of practice of those. Terrifying.

PIVOT

Serious things

• University lecture (communications strategy) delivered. I now conclude with an exercise where we invent conspiracy theories on the fly. It puts theory into practice and embeds critical awareness skills. Or it trains the next generation of Q. Either way, I hope the students remember me fondly.

• Conference talk (community cohesion) accepted; coming this summer.

• Report published. I’ve spent the last year as one of the Independent Commissioners on Inclusion and Belonging in a Multi-Ethnic Newham, and our final report was released in March. This was a great project to be a part of, and the conclusions are suitably ambitious. I may write more about this later. No pledges/promises.

• TEDx film coming this spring. I’m not sure when. I’m at the mercy of BIG TED. As I told my mom, ‘if it is good, I’ll send you a link. If not, I’ll never mention it again.’

END PIVOT 
BACK TO GOOFY STUFF

BBQ

• Judging in May.

• Competing at Beefstock in August.

• Competing at Smoke on the Waters in September.

• Finishing paperwork and admin for Kindling, including commissioning three two more articles for new issues. (One’s in.)

If time permits, I’ll probably judge a few more - or Paul and I will just tag along and hang out with our buddies. Kindling-wise, I’d like to have the new issues ready for the summer competitions.

Shelfies

• Keep it up.

Shelfies ticks along nicely. We now have a list of books, a list of contributors, and actual instructions for people interested in submitting their own shelfies. Eighteen months in, it is such an electic mix, but we’re also starting to see some books (hi, Piranesi!) appear on a few different favourite bookshelves.

I have been feeding the local crows in the hopes that, when The End comes, they eat me last. (This is also why I feed Buster.)

what I’m reading (offline)

I have been objectively terrible at reading challenges for the past few years, but I’ve somewhat stumbled on two.

The first, I’ve mentioned before, is library-related. We are instilling Good Library Behaviour in the young goblin, and go every week. The Goblin gets some books and I get some books.

It turns out that our local library has a phenomenal collection of the Very Short Introductions series, and I check out a new one every week. Think of as the Very Short Renaissance Project. The Goblin chooses for me, which adds a certain element of dramatic tension. So far, topics have included: Pain, Home, Spartans, Superstition, Evil, The Suburbs, Citizenship, Decadence and Clausewitz. Which is sure a mix.

A couple have been genuinely great. (Clausewitz was fantastic.) But all of them have one or two sticky ideas in there.

The second is a Kindle house-cleaning. I have owned a Kindle since 2008. I still have my Gen 1 Kindle around because it is adorable and reminds me of that innocent time when Amazon was a slightly less obvious existential threat. That’s eighteen years of review reading, slush reading, manuscripts and awards submissions. Also reading challenges, late night ‘shopping’ trips to Project Gutenberg, chonky research documents, and test versions of my own books. Oh, and a lot of comics, as Comixology (RIP) was devoured by the Amazon machine at some point.

Anyway, early in January I spotted that I had 1870 ‘read’ items and 1916 ‘unread’ ones. I know! That stresses me out too! I will not get through all two thousand unread books this year, but I can get over the tipping point, so that R > TBR.

This has already lead to a lot of very strange reading - an 1895 Kosher cookbook? A Dragonlance module?! Ain’t She Sweet by Susan Elizabeth Phillips?! I honestly don’t know what goes through my head sometimes; this is white water rafting trip through two decades of fleeting obsessions.

Between these two challenges, my impulse shopping has declined a bit, which is undoubtedly rocking the bottom-line for the industry.

what I’m cooking

I’m pickling!

Last year saw me dabble in some strange culinary behaviours, and I think this probably rounds it off nicely. The URGE TO PICKLE is strong.

First, we now get a box o’ veggies every week that’s separate from our normal grocery order because it is fresher, cheaper and less plastic-wrapped. It is a LOT of veg, and I’m slightly twitchy about wastage. This has inspired a lot of stocks and soups, some of which are tasty and all of which smell terrible. Pickling is the next attempt.

Second, Paul and I have been working all year on perfecting a new dish for Perdido Street Bacon’s competitive BBQ repertoire. My suspicion is that something pickled might just be the secret ingredient it requires.

Third, it turns out, you can pickle, like, anything. I’m sure this won’t end badly at all.

Buster slinks by, reeking of vinegar.

Two newsletters in two weeks! Don’t worry, I’ll now go dark again until summer. Also, this is a long one, with a lot of links, so you may find it easier to read online. Sorry about that.

There were long weeks in 2025 that went by without me reading at all, which is one of those things where stress compounds stress. Reading is important! Read more, kids! I also didn’t have any awards to judge last year and Real Life Responsibilities overwhelmed all my reading challenge commitments. All in all, it felt like a year where I wasn’t reading enough.

(Coincidentally, one of my friends and role models writes about the challenges of reading in a responsibility-filled world in a recent Shelfie. She’s handling her Responsibilities with much more aplomb than I am, but that, in general, has long been the difference between us.)

All that said, according to my trusty Goodreads page, I covered a surprising amount of ground in 2025. Aided by - amongst other things - Bradford Literature Festival, some anthology background reading, and a fair amount of comfort reading.

A moment for introspective trend-spotting:

• Like the last few years, I read a lot of romance in 2025. Unlike the last few years, I wasn’t blown away by it. I could blame the way the modern romance genre is ‘maturing’ right now, but I suspect, in romance terms, it is ‘me, not you’ - my taste has moved to a different part of the cycle.

• In fact, my favourite books this year were all a bit weird. Fantasy books that subvert traditional tropes. Genre mash-ups. Books that don’t fit in categories neatly, or aren’t written in traditional ways.

• There’s still a lot comfort reading in here, but rather than finding it in new, squishy romances, it came from revisiting favourites from when I was a teenager.

• Fewer comics than usual. This is disappointing! Exactly a year ago, my holiday present to myself was a cheap tablet and a Marvel Unlimited subscription, with the notion of reading more comics this year. Spoiler: I did not. I found MU really user-unfriendly, and the tablet has now been repurposed as the ‘kid movies for train journeys’ device. I read a few comics, and I’d love to read more, but going digital was clearly not the solution. I have since unsubscribed to MU and will be trying to find another way forward. The library, maybe?

• As always, humour goes a long way. When I make these lists, the books I often remember most - and most positively - are the ones that made me chuckle.

Without further ado, some of my recommended reading from 2025. These are not all 2025 books (very few are). I’ve put in Bookshop.org links where I can, but some aren’t available there - either because they’re out of print or because I still don’t really understand how Bookshop.org get their stock. Happy hunting!

I was a guest on Josh Connolly’s Dysfunctional podcast this week!

We talk for an hour about the role that communications can play in preventing extreme violence. Josh is a phenomenal guy and doesn’t shy away from asking tough questions. One tiny caveat: I’m very … jiggly… which is entirely down to Foof being camped on my feet for the entire podcast. Cats!

Find it on Acast / Spotify / Apple / YouTube

Molly Aitken’s Bright I Burn - Historical fiction inspired by the first woman in Ireland to be burned as a witch. Both vicious and sympathetic, a look at a powerful, fascinating woman and her life. Somewhat fantastical, in the classic sense that ‘all history is a secondary world’, and the protagonist’s perspective is heavily inflected by her superstitious and omen-inflected perceptions of the world around her.

Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover - Another genre mash-up, although this time in the very way the book is written and presented. A coming-of-age story about two boys, their love of basketball, their adoration of their father, and the inevitable challenge of growing up and apart. Written in verse, it is really powerful. You can hear the rhythm of the ball on the court.

Ibn Razīn Al-Tujībī Al-Tujībī’s The Exile’s Cookbook - Translated ancient cookbook from Muslim Spain. I enjoyed this way too much for a fairly esoteric tome, and have adapted one recipe for the BBQ already. (I referenced this book in my TED talk, because, of course I did.)

Kent Babb’s Across the River: Life, Death and Football in an American City - Non-fiction, following a season with a high school football team in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is somewhat hopeful, as you see the discipline, passion and belonging that football provides to young men in a shattered city. But overshadowing that hope is the stark acknowledgement of the personal sacrifices by coaches, parents and teachers to provide these slimmest of lifelines. And, beyond that, the vast majority of young people in the system who don’t even have access to the faint hope that football can provide. Grim stuff.

Leonora Bell’s If I Only Had a Duke - I think I’ve read all possible permutations of ducal bonking at this point. They all tend to dance together in one big anachronistic ballroom of lustful hijinks. (It doesn’t help that Historical Romance’s penchant for punny titles and similar covers means that the books themselves are entirely interchangeable.) In this one, my favourite of the year, a young woman determined to not be married is made the talk of the ton when a popular Duke waltzes with her on a whim. Irritated by the attention and keen to return to her original plans (a cottage in Ireland, lots of books; you can see the appeal), she convinces the Duke to escort her overseas because… reasons? I dunno. Hijinks! Lustful hijinks!

John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost - A forgotten standalone fantasy classic by the author of The House with a Clock in its Walls. Two middle-aged wizards of negligable influence are being pursued by a mysterious dark wizard of terrifying power. It is esoteric and entirely adorable. Not a book for people who like robust magic systems or detailed world-building; this is an atmospheric, academic, meandering adventure. No longer in print, but well worth finding.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup - This book won pretty much every genre award last year, and, having read it, it is a worthy winner. If you’ll forgive me the deeply annoying and hipsterish statement that is about to follow… this isn’t Bennett’s best book. It is really good, don’t get me wrong, but RJB has been steadily turning out clever, weird, genre-bending books for over fifteen years now. This book - a murder mystery in a Roman-inspired fantasy world dominated by fungal kaiju - is almost Bennett-lite. Read his other books! He gets even more clever and weird and genre-bending! Check out his first album, yo. I have it on vinyl.

(As an aside, this reminds me a lot of when A Game of Thrones came out and Ye Olde Fans were exasperated because GRRM had been putting out genuinely amazing and subversive science fiction, fantasy and horror for decades. But slap some dragons on it and throw in proper marketing and suddenly everyone’s a GRRM fan?! Bah! Read Fevre Dream and The Apocalypse Rag!)

(Counterpoint: if you turn this on its head, it is fantastic that authors like GRRM and RJB finally get the attention they have always deserved, if a lot later than expected. There is hope for us all!)

Olivie Blake’s Masters of Death - A charming standalone about gods and death and estate agents and ghosts and, above all, love. It reminds me a lot of Good Omens. I’ve not talked about Gaiman here, and it feels like a disservice to derail my Blake praise to have a rant about the impact of genre fiction’s most iconic figure being unmasked as a sex predator. So I won’t. BUT,… I see a lot of what-I-liked-about-Gaiman’s-work in Blake’s. Blake is funny and romantic. Her plots are winding and often melodramatic, and don’t shy away from people saying the Big Things to one another. She writes lovely books that don’t shy away from hard-hitting moments. Even her books about Bad People still portray them sympathetic and fragile, and always find reasons for redemption. Masters of Death is all that and funny, thus the Pratchett comparison as well. Also this is an actual true standalone fantasy with a big cosmic plot that starts, middles and ends tidily.

Katie Bohn’s Romance is Dead - A murder mystery on a B-movie set? With a romance between a bored scream queen and a foppish reality star? Sign me up. Very goofy, very fun.

Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow - I’ve read Brackett’s peripatetic, post-apocalyptic novel a few times now. It depresses me every single time. Then a few years pass and I think I should try again. And then it depresses me again! This is, basically, the plot of The Long Tomorrow.

Elise Bryant’s It’s Elementary - There’s a new sub-genre now of mommy-detectives. Mothers (usually single) who have to navigate the PTA and also MURDER. They’re outsiders in their social circles, have precocious kid/s who are facing their own issues, and there maaaaaay be a hot teacher involved. I hesitate to call these a type of ‘cozy’, as, although they’re often funny, they are very much rooted in the real struggles of modern motherhood, and they can be very stressful reads. Neither are they ‘noir’, although they do share that sense of isolation, and being trapped by circumstances. Whatever they are, they’re popular - and this is my favourite of the ones I’ve read.

Marcus Carter’s Treacherous Play - There have been a lot of studies about people that play violent video games. Does it make them bad people? (Spoilers: no.) But what about games where you’re encouraged to ‘play badly’ - e.g. use deceit and treachery to win? Or people that play games in a kinda mean way? As someone that has burned several friendships over games of Diplomacy, I thought this study into ‘treacherous play’ was absolutely fascinating.

Amy Coombe’s Stay for a Spell - Hey, this book isn’t out yet, but you can pre-order it! An overworked princess is “cursed” by a magical bookshop, and is forced to live amongst piles of delightful reading rather than be “free” to continue her grueling diplomatic duties. It is an ode to books, obviously. And a charming subversion of classic fairy tale tropes. It is also about making your own destiny. And roguish pirates. And bookshop cats. It is a delight. Above all else: if you make me laugh out loud, you get a place on this list.

Katie Cotugno’s Meet the Benedettos - This list is alphabetical, which is unfortunate as it ruins my need for drama. But, hey, this sassy Pride & Prejudice retelling featuring a family of former reality TV stars is my personal book of the year. It is a great story in its own right, as well as being a creative - genuinely surprising! - reintepretation of the original. Cotugno’s books (of which I’ve now read ALL of them) tend to feature deeply flawed characters, and often ‘reclaim’ villainous or unlikeable people - painting them sympathetically while still acknowledging their mistakes. Continuing this trend, Meet the Benedettos gives some pride back to the minor characters about whom we are prejudiced after eading Austen’s original story. That is a very poorly constructed sentence, but I was determined to make it work.

(You’ll note the US link for the above. This book is annoyingly hard to find in the UK, and I’ve had to smuggle back copies to give to friends. Cotugno - who I first ‘discovered’ in a library book! - deserves more attention the the UK. I absolutely get why her books aren’t fly-off-the-shelf popular: they’re pitched as conventional (YA or adult) stories, which is a bit of a trap, as they aren’t. Readers go fully Marmite when they encounter her deeply flawed, mistake-prone characters. The British crowd has traditionally been more accepting of moral ambiguity in its young adult fiction than the equivalent American readership. Thus my two cents: publish her more and better, Britain!)

Timothy Fuller’s Harvard Has a Homicide - 1936 murder mystery set at Harvard, and one of the first popular crime novels with a university setting. A locked room, of sorts, with a snarky protagonist. It is really a window into a different time, and the university experience of 1936 bears very little resemblance to 2025. Written by a Harvard student (who was amazed at its sales), it is perhaps most interesting as a historical artefact.

Kate Golden’s Half City - Another book not out until next year. The publisher blurb promises that this urban fantasy / magic school / demon hunter mash-up will be my ‘next obsession’ and… they’re not wrong. This book is stupidly fun.

Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series - My series of the year! I know it is fudge to have a book of the year and a series of the year, but my newsletter, my rules. This trilogy of mysteries (plus her new collection, Little Mysteries) is fantastic. In every sense. Yes, it is a down-and-out, booze-addled noir detective who balances self-destruction with a passion for the truth. But it is also really odd, with a whimsical approach to detection that is seemingly mystical, but deeply rooted in an appreciation of human behaviour. There’s a semi-magical book! There’s a trilogy-long subplot about girl detectives! There’s an existentialist Nancy Drew meta-mystery! Sara Gran is operating on a higher plane, and it shows.

These books are brilliant mysteries (and fair ones- which is important, especially in a crime novel that’s overtly weird) and also something else entirely. To make a very loose comparison: this reminds me Grant Morrison’s Mystery Play, where there’s the text you read, but the work itself is some sort of literary sigil: a metatextual creation with some sort of underlying paranormal intent. There are layers within layers to these books, and I’m not convinced they all even exist in our reality. How’s that for a blurb?

Helen Graves’ My Drunken Kitchen - Absolutely hilarious, and from one of my favourite writers (food and otherwise). Also the recipes are great. Unpretentious and delicious, and easy enough to make whilst squiffy.

Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword - I could write about this book AGAIN, but you’ve heard it all from me before.

Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road - Hey, this is not fiction. I don’t know why I thought it was? But after I read it, Anne told me this was actually a true story - a real collection of correspondence - and I got very teary. It is lovely, and a much-needed reminder that people are good.

Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char - In a year of reading some very Odd fantasy books (many of which skulk about on this list), this was, perhaps, the Oddest, and I think it is terrific. You see, there’s a sort of pandimensional conclave of, uh, orphaned suburban children who all have godly powers but are undeniably insane? And they work for, but also against, their omnipotent Father? And some random dude gets caught up in the plot? And also the President of the United States? And also a lion? It is incredibly violent and gross! But also, there’s a library!

(In the spirit of unsolicited feedback, that cover isn’t very good, is it? And the blurb of ‘ambitious!’ is both 100% accurate but also absolutely the definition of ‘damned with faint praise’. This limited edition has a much foxier cover, and is probably good for fans, but I’m not sure it makes any sense - or is very appealing to - people who haven’t read the book already. Flipping through the foreign editions there are some really bold interpretations, but I am not sure anyone comes close to nailing it. Especially not these guys. I don’t know what the answer is here. The challenge of selling a VERY WEIRD book.)

Elin Hilderbrand’s Swan Song - My first Hilderbrand! It is hot, rich people! Scheming and conniving and maybe even killing one another! How did it take me so long to find her?!

Shubnum Khan’s The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years - Another fabulous genre-spanning work, both comfortable and disruptive. A found family (of sorts) in a creaky old house in Durban. Everyone has their story and their secrets; some more than others. The combination of a child, a ghost and a disaster helps bring the story to its resolution. Stylishly written and extremely atmospheric.

Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistable Urge to Fall for Your Enemy - This is ADORABLE. Yes, it is repurposed Harry Potter fanfic, but no, it is not Manacled and won’t make you bleach your soul after reading. A very proper and hardworking doctor-wizard is forced to buddy up with a very sassy and notorious assassin-wizard. There’s a plague or something, but who cares, they’re cute and the book is cover-to-cover BANTER, and it is great. This also made me laugh out loud.

Grace Li’s Portrait of a Thief - Museum heists with Chinese-American post-grads stealing colonial-era artifacts to return to China. Is it morally grey? More than a little. Are the heists ridiculous? Absolutely. It is fun? Immensely.

(I like the a lot cover, btw. It screams ‘modern heist’. Sleek and contemporary, but with an classy, iconic nod to it.)

Kirsty Logan’s No and Other Love Stories - Logan has long been one of my favourite authors. This is a deeply distrubing collection and I adored every story in it while also having nightmares as a result. Enjoy!

Will McPhail’s In - To quote Anne: ‘why are all cartoonist’s memoirs so depressing?’. And this is, in fact, depressing! An artist searches for connection, and stumbles on a shortcut to hasten and deepen his relationships with other people. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a Question he can ask people that unlocks them, encourages them to open up, and, ultimately, makes him feel less lonely. It is a lovely idea, but does it work in practice? And does it get him the answers he really wants? This is a beautiful book about the insidious power of loneliness.

Daniel Polansky’s March’s End - Polansky, like Bennett (above), has been banging out brilliant weird fantasy books for over a decade. I’m hoping he’s the next one to be ‘discovered’ by the awards, as it is long overdue. March’s End is typical Polansky: a deeply troubling look at ‘portal fantasies’, with the March family juggling their real world needs with absolute power in a (slowly crumbling) magical realm. It is a take on the authoritarian tradition in fantasy, and pokes holes in the divine right of kings and chosen ones alike. Not dissimilar to The Magicians, but, I think, a lot more kind at heart. There’s no true Evil here (any more than there is objective Good), rather a lot of bumbling mortals dealing with more authority and power than any individual should rightly ever have.

(You know what? I also don’t like this cover. The challenge of a VERY WEIRD fantasy again. The throne with chains is a good symbol, and actually captures the book well. But it is buried in a very generic aesthetic, and this looks like Any Other Fantasy, which it decidedly isn’t.)

Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness - I reread a lot of my favourite fantasy epics this year: Belgariad; Memory, Sorrow and Thorn; Harper Hall… This, despite being of the same general vintage, wasn’t a reread. Alanna is both the classic fantasy protagonist and very much a young woman. There’s something really important about the way that Pierce does both, and I think I missed out by not reading this at a more formative time. Better late than never.

Claudia Roden’s Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts - An ode to outdoor eating, with lots of creative ideas on how to make it fun and memorable. I look forward to both days of summer in 2026.

Sofia Samatar’s Tender - Samatar is always magnificent. A diverse collection of stories and themes, united by her uniquely flowing style of prose.

Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings - Murder mystery/fantasy in a secondary world! A magically-empowered magistrate and his assistants try to solve a murder and get caught up in big ol’ political schemes. Vonvalt, the titular Justice, is a fascinating character: a crusader who truly believes in the importance of his work and the empire behind it. But is the society he fights for worth saving? Or is he the last good man? I’m not sure where the series is going, and I’m interested to see how it builds on this very promising start.

(This cover works for me. Big, imperial. Old school. It goes thonk. Works for the series format as well. This is an old school fantasy, and about people facing the challenge of becoming ‘heroic’ or iconic in some way. You feel that weight.)

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys - I finally read this book! It is good.

Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals - I’ve read a lot of Secret History knock-offs over the past few years, and this is - in many ways - the closest to Tartt’s masterpiece. The protagonist is an outsider, invited into a close-knit group of elite Cambridge students. There’s the awkwardness and the anxiety. There’s also an academic obsession, something that demonstrates the group’s general divorce from reality. This is more reader-friendly than The Secret HIstory, with a ‘happier’ ending, something of a romance, and less overall contempt for its characters. But, as far as Dark Academia goes, this gets it.

(First published in 2012, it is surprisingly out of print as a physical book, but the ebook seems readily available. More unsolicited advice: with the Dark Academia boom, this one is worth rejacketing and chucking back out into the market. You’re welcome, publishing!)

Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow - I finally read this book too! It is also good!

because tis the season

Buy my book.

Or, if you’re in the UK, both books.

Above and beyond everything else: I hope your holiday season goes well, and you are happy, healthy and stress-free. Please take care of yourself, eat delicious things, and - as much as possible - get some rest! 2025 was sure a thing. Thanks for putting up with my intermittant rambling for another year, and look forward to oversharing more in the next one.

I was back in Kansas City briefly, and although a whirlwind trip, I did manage to sneak in visits to three different BBQ joints: Jack Stack (twice), Q39 and Joe’s Kansas City.

Jack Stack is not my favorite - my sister really likes it, because she swears by the sides. I had a rib-related disappointment there on my last visit, so I don’t trust them for those any more, and stick to the sandwiches. Given that I rate ribs above all other forms of BBQ, that’s the equivalent of the scene in a cop drama where the homicide detective is sent off to write parking tickets. All that said, they do a good sandwich, and their lamb ribs, although ‘exotic’, are great. I’m neutral on the sides, but my sister has very strong feelings about the cheesy corn and beans, and her endorsement is important.

Q39 is famous for the brisket, and, yup. That’s a great brisket. I also really liked the fries. (We sound very sides-obsessed as a family, which, I suppose, we are?) I also highly recommend the burnt ends.

And Joe’s is, well, Joe’s. Anecdote within anecdote: years ago, we did a blind taste test. My whole family split up and crawled over the city, bringing back from each one a) ribs, b) a pound of meat and c) a bottle of sauce. Anne and my sister-in-law (non KC natives, and therefore unbiased) then unpacked everything and set it out as a blind taste test. After a long afternoon of gorging and scoring, we discovered that there was a clear champion: Joe’s. This is backed up by, well, everyone else’s opinion.

‘Salads’ at Joe’s Kansas City.

Which is to say, last week, we ate the hell out of Joe’s. Sandwiches, ribs and one of every side (side obsessed!). We were there at a weird, midafternoon, surprisingly-empty time, and got to linger over the table - even going back for a tray of burnt ends. It was great.

And that - to land this particular anecdotal helicopter - is the point here. It was great. Capital-G-Great. The UK has an influx of BBQ places, because the arc of history bends towards tasty justice. Personally, I’ve also gotten pretty good at making my own BBQ over the past few years. Low and slow and smoked and hickory-scented is, although still not ubiquitous, at least not uncommon. I can now say that the BBQ available to me in London, whether that’s in a restaurant or off my own smoker is Good.

But… the BBQ I ate in KC? It was Great.

Apologies, as I use this example a lot but… Back when I was judging the Kitschies (pours rum in remembrance), I had to read a lot of books, very, very quickly. What I found is that, at the start, I was a harsher critic. But as time went on, I’d be tagging more things as ‘maybes’ or passing them to other judges as possibilities. The more I read, the more my standards gravitated to the mean. I don’t want to use the word ‘lowered’, but, ‘normalised’ perhaps. My qualitative taste was, ultimately, susceptible to context.

I wasn’t the only one facing this - and all the other judges over the years experienced a similar challenge. That’s why you have a panel, after all. We all had our own coping mechanisms, ways of dealing with the Creeping Mediocrity. For me, it was a reset; taking a break for some sort of external reminder. For the Kitschies, time-constrained or not, I would take a break and revisit a book that I truly found Great. The Hobbit, Perdido Street Station, The Crystal Cave, whatever. Or even a previous winner: A Monster Calls is a quick read and serves as a qualitative North Star. An award like the Kitschies wasn’t about celebrating the norm of goodness (that’s what prizes using popular votes mechanics do), it is about discovering the outlier of greatness. The best way of doing that is to remind yourself, occasionally, what greatness actually looks like. If you’re just starting at the good all day, you celebrate incremental improvements - that’s not bad, by any means, and there’s value to it. But the great lurks miles away, squatting on the mountaintop.

(I’ve also had the honour of judging prizes, where to be honest, I needed an external reminder of ‘goodness’. I don’t say this [solely] to be snarky, but to warn that the, uh, ‘contextual quality normalisation’ can slide into the negative as well. What’s the fiction equivalent of the Overton Window? The Overton Kindle? The Goodkind Door?!)

Incremental improvement is important! We should strive to be better every day. The arc of history is slow, after all, and there’s we should make things a little bit better, whenever and wherever we can. But… it is also worth taking that occasional step back from the context we’re in; getting the perspective we need to reset our standards. Remind ourselves not only what good looks like, but also that the great is possible. Whether that’s A Monster Calls or Joe’s ribs, these things exist in our world to inspire us to achieve the extraordinary.

The best part, of course, is that I had placed an order with my butcher before I even got on the plane back to KC. I want to make great BBQ. I am now fully, freshly aware of how far I have to go, and I’m excited to get there.

what I’m doing

I am now a TED speaker. Mostly! We’ll see how it looks on video. I think there will be something to watch in early 2026, so, watch this space. Thanks to everyone that turned up. Doing my extremism x BBQ x unintentional stand-up routine in front of two hundred people would’ve been a lot more awkward if everyone weren’t absolutely lovely. I made some amazing new friends as well.

Kindling is in the wild! There’s a website now, but, more importantly, I’ve already run through the initial print run. The next three Big Questions are briefed out to various experts, and I’ll be doing another print run in January.

Worlds of Wonder is out! For real now. A collection of essays on children’s literature. It has two essays by yours truly on some classic fantasy stories: “The Dark is Rising” and “The Sword in the Stone”.

Given the time of year, I should probably mention that The Big Book of Cyberpunk makes a REALLY GOOD GIFT for the reader / gamer / film buff / computer nerd / political activist / best friend / in your life. There's the floppy US edition or the stately two volume hardcover UK edition. Both look ravishing in a very large stocking.

My latest anthology is 95% delivered. All the authors and stories are in, and I’m just ‘tidying up’ (e.g. ‘writing’) the editorial matter. As I write this, I realise that it hasn’t actually been announced yet, so, uh, that’s all you get to now for know.

I have two (2) book pitches out on sub - one fiction, one nonfiction. In a perfect world, I’m always working on two (2) books at a time, one at the admin/rights/organisational stage and one at the writing/editing stage. This would, conceptually, mean I have exactly one book out every year. In our actual world: ROFL.

what I’m reading

We go to the library every week - both to Teach The Child and also make a tiny, worthy concession to the cost of living crisis (85% of our discretionary spending is on books; fun fact: going to the library has not cut that down at all). Our local library has a very cool thing, which is an entire bookcase full of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. I’ve been trying to get a different one every week, and have learned about topics as diverse as Clausewitz and Citizenship. They’re not all brilliant books, but even the less-than-great ones generally contain one or two interesting notions that stick with me.

I’ll try to do a pre-holidays list of reading recommendations, but here are some books I didn’t enjoy for various reasons:

Ali Hazelwood’s Problematic Summer Romance was, indeed, problematic. No false advertising there. It was also very slight: it felt like bonus content for the rest of her series. I suspect you need to be much more emotionally invested to find the romantic silver lining in a story about grooming. That necessary connection between reader and character isn’t there when it reads like an author’s fanfic of her own minor characters.

I think Hazelwood is a lightning rod for criticism, possibly because she’s one of the pioneering - and most visible - modern romance authors. Generally speaking, I think that criticism is unfounded. Her works - goofy, silly, filthy, over the top - are compulsively readable, and invariably good-natured fun. In this case, that good-natured niceness was a varnish over something so deeply, intentionally problematic and the resulting bon-bon of ickiness felt all the more troublesome for it. A thought experiment, maybe? I applaud her commitment to dancing across all possible tropes across the body of her work, but I think mining this particular one was a mistake.

I made a start on the Artefacts of Ouranos series. I enjoyed Trial of the Sun Queen a lot: it is by the numbers, but, by gum, I like those numbers. Rule of the Aurora King, however, lost me. The format was different - it changed perspectives and tenses - which was already a bit off. Then, by the second chapter, the author was feverishly ret-conning events and adding new ‘secrets’ and ‘powers’ that the character apparently knew all along but had forgotten to tell us and and and… It had undeniable momentum and the joyous ‘throwing the sink at it’ vibe never tailed off, but I’m afraid I don’t have it in me for book three. I feel slightly hypocritical as, with Throne of Glass, for example, I was happy to perservere through several ok-ish books to get to the wonderfulness. But I don’t have it in me for this one.

The Chamber by Will Dean was another library book (thanks, libraries!). I really liked about 95% of this locked room mystery featuring underwater welders. The most locked of all rooms: six people trapped deep underwater in a pressurised tank. But then they start dying! Aaah! The book was a concatenation of diving-related horror stories and gruesome anecdotes (awesome), but the actual mystery was pretty lacklustre. When it came to the reveal! Or was it!? The real reveal!!! OR WAS IT?!?! sequence of twists at the end, I was left a little, well, high and dry. (Zing.)

One recommendation, just to counteract that swathe of negativity: Michael Twitty’s The American South is a new cookbook from Phaidon. It is gorgeous, Twitty’s voice is a blast, and the recipes look amazing. The only thing I miss in it is a steer on portion sizes, as yesterday I accidentally made two gallons of soup…

I am giving a talk at TEDxBristol on 8 November! 

It will, genuinely, actually, for real, be about how BBQ is the solution to some of the world’s trickiest problems…

Bad guy is cooking hot and fast with that sword.

The meme really says it all.

There’s a whole day of talks! I’ve had previews of most of them, being that we’re a pretty chatty cohort, and every one I’ve seen has been excellent. If you just want to pop in for one session (perhaps the third one), I’m sharing the evening slot with Romy Gill, Stark Holborn, Martin Bisp and Amelia Howe, which is pretty incredible.

Not to spoil the whole thing, but I am painfully conscious that there’s a natural inclination to believe ‘I like a thing, therefore it must be good for everyone’. Be that herbal supplements, yoga, fascism or BBQ. And I’m not proposing that BBQ itself is the solution to all our problems. But BBQ - although not a metaphor for the solutions we need - does make for a really good analogy. I promise that will make sense after the talk. Well, hopefully. Please do come along if you can.

The most disappointing thing, of course, is that I can no longer make fun of people who give TED talks.

Here’s the thing though:

I think that BBQ itself actually is the solution to some problems. And not just an empty stomach. BBQ is a very accessible hobby and a mindful pastime and a quaint community practice with a rich and authentic history. It is all those things! As are knitting, Pokemon and Morris Dancing. But BBQ also brings some unique traits to the table.

One example: BBQ can’t be rushed. The relationship with time is intrinsic to BBQness. On one hand, that relationship can be a little fraught. There’s the dreaded, but inescapable ‘stall’ at the midpoint of a BBQ. There are competition tricks to cook ‘fast and hot’, so you’re turning out briskets in five hours instead of twelve. Hacks to try and pare off some of those empty hours.

On the other end, those empty hours are the point. BBQ is defined by being low and slow: the process and the purpose are inextricably intertwined. In fact, BBQ’s relationship with slow time is not only inherent, but also positive. It encourages you to embrace the moments where you have to do nothing. Take, for instance, one basic BBQ rule of thumb: ‘the amount of time it takes to light coals is the amount of time it takes to drink a beer’. This varies (coals light faster in Australia), but it shows that BBQ has, if anything, a positive relationship with downtime. You’re ‘stuck’ there: enjoy yourself.

That relationship with the empty hours is why BBQ makes for great hobby/mindful pastime/community practice. It forces you to engage with yourself and with those around you. BBQs are wonderful places for companionable silence. They’re also natural spaces to talk. You’re all stuck there. You’re all on the same side. You’re all distracted. You’re all waiting. It is, in fact, the best place to chat.

… and I’m putting this notion to the test.

Allow me to introduce my latest mad scheme:

Kindling 

Kindling is based on my belief that the best conversations happen around the fire. It takes the form of a four page, tabloid-format newspaper. Each issue is themed around one big, critical question: Which is the best Keanu Reeves movie? Who is the best athlete you’ve ever seen live? Who is your favourite member of the X-Men?* The really important stuff; critical for fireside discussion.

Each issue of Kindling also comes with some trivia and fun facts to help fuel the debate. And one guest perspective from an expert on that particular topic. These essays are fun and personal, they help inspire the conversation. They’re also, conveniently, meant to be about ten minutes long - about the length of time it take for your coal to start. Something to read with your beer.

Kindling is newspaper format because it is, in fact, actual kindling. When you’re done, toss it on the fire. Unlike my previous publishing endeavours, this one is designed to be ephemeral. There are no issue numbers or editions. The point of Kindling is to start the conversation. Once that’s accomplished, Kindling can go forth to Valhalla.

I’ll have some issues of Kindling with me in Bristol (see above) to show off. The ideal outcome is that Kindle becomes freely available through partners and distributors. Butchers, grocers, log deliverers, hardware stores: they can put their logo on it and drop it in with their outgoing deliveries as a fun, free surprise for their customers. (Chippies, pubs, cinemas also welcome.) I’m funding the first few print runs myself, and making sure the contributors get paid. However, I’m keen to find sponsors as well as distribution partners for the long-term.

If you’re interested in supporting Kindling as a writer, distributor, partner, sponsor, evaluator (I know, I’m fun at parties) or whatever, drop me a line. It may very well flare out after this first go, but, why not?

Honestly, it feels good to make something again, and if there’s one thing I believe in, it is BBQ.

_{*Constantine. Serena. Magneto.}

Tentacle cat!

I am obviously biased ‘cause I think the author is nifty, but I think Stay by a Spell is delightful. It made me laugh (a lot), there’s a great bookshop cat (with tentacles) and the whole thing is both incredibly sweet whilst also being gently subversive of ye olde fantasy tropes. Basically my cup of tea. You can now pre-order in the US (Barnes & Noble) and UK (Waterstones, Blackwell’s). And your local bookshop would undoubtedly gleefully pre-order it if you asked nicely.

I received an email last week from Typepad, announcing that they are shutting down their whole platform, effective the end of September. Back up yer assets before they are lost to the seas of time, etc.

I have been a Typepad user since it first began. In 2006, I had outgrown our primitive Blogger- based blog and needed to port it over somewhere. At the time, it was either Typepad or WordPress. The reason I went for the former was largely confidence (or lack thereof). I had, at the time, my domain name/s already purchased and Typepad had a relatively easy way of making the DNS work. WordPress involved an arcane process of intalling the platform on own server, or something like that. It was waaaaaay more complicated that I could do at the time. Repointing the DNS somewhere was already stretching my inelastic technical skills to the breaking point.

Typepad wasn’t ever great. The main selling point was a certain level of ‘ok-ness’. The ‘pro’ package let me do basically everything I needed to do, and - to give credit to the Typepad team - they certainly tried to add new features when they could. The social integration was never great, and I don’t think they even attempted to compete with the newsletter boom, so… the writing was always on the wall. For the $12.50/month I paid for the ‘Pro Unlimited’ plan, there always were far better ways to host and craft my contest if I could’ve ever been bothered to port it all over. But, like most subscription services, inertia proved an exceptional loyalty program.

RIP Typepad. You did the job! For two decades! That’s a millennium in internet years.

As Engadget cruelly eulogises, ‘there are probably only a few people [still] using it’, so this is a very small molehill for me to be mountaining.

But a-mountaining I will go:

There are very few blogs any more, and I think that is a Bad Thing. Blogs weren’t ‘all that’, and most of them were, of course, crap. But they were the feeder tools that taught people how to write original, well-written, medium-length articles (often on a deadline). Without the motivation or the opportunity, that capability has now disappeared. They tought us how to compose (and deconstruct) simple arguments, how to write for audience, and - conversely - to think about the composure and writing of other people.

Beyond blogs, even the corporate or commercial media that I used to read (emphasis on that particular verb) on the lunch break have now pivoted to AI-generated copy, vapid think pieces with Trumpian cadence, and noisy video extracts. There are still some very good places for longer reads (largely newsletters, paywalled sites, or paywalled newsletters), but the era of free, text-based platform sites that published original, well-written, medium-length articles, multiple times every day … well, that era is truly over.

For all the crap that the content marketing era produced, it was still fundamentally about leading people to places; away from the search screen. Now, with Google slurping everything into an AI output, there’s very little incentive to make your own digital place and put it out there in the hopes of having it found by an audience. I suspect Typepad fell into a terrible purgatory: the content is maybe good enough to get slurped up, but not prominent enough to earn a link back. Why pay $12.50/month for the privilege of publishing text that will never be read, and, at best, be stolen and barfed back to the unsuspecting?

Many (most) of you know more about this than I do, so all thoughts welcome.

I actually still have four (4!) blogs live on Typepad.

Apologies for the inside baseball, but because people are never transparent about this sort of thing, I’m going to indulge myself.

Cover by Jonathan E for The Best of British Fantasy 2019

The Best of British Fantasy was, to be totally transparent, one of those content marketing schemes. It meant to support the ongoing (in theory) Best of British Fantasy series that I was editing for NewCon. The URL happened to be available, and it really wasn’t hard to churn out or repurpose listicles or essays to bump the SEO. In practice, the ‘ongoing’ series turned out to be two volumes, and I couldn’t be bothered to maintain this after the second on published in 2019. Typepad says this site somehow earned over 30,000 total visits during its short run (all organic!), which is actually pretty impressive as a proof of concept. That is, for a concept that is no longer viable, for a product that no longer exists. Good times!

Jeffrey Alan Love art from The Extinction Event (the last Jurassic London title)

Jurassic London was the site for our publishing imprint. The imprint itself closed in 2016. A few years ago, I hid most of the book pages (frustrating a few bibliophiles in the process) and just used it as a one page personal site. After being caught in the wake of some GamerGate shenanigans, I took that down too. Thus its current, very terse, existence. Jurassic somehow accumulated over 60,000 lifetime visits. The VAST majority of these visits took place during the publisher’s active years, but it still has wee peaks when folks are searching for me for some reason or another. Why did 23 people wind up there last Sunday?! Who knows?!

Of all four sites, this is the one going to make the most work for me. Although I’ve unpublished the pages, the Jurassic site is still the best (only) repository of all information about the forty-odd books we published, including publishing details, reviews, awards, etc. That all needs to go somewhere. SF/F is the most bibliographically-obsessed subgenre of fiction, and I don’t want these books to disappear from the historical record.

I also need to make a personal website. I’ve said it before, but everyone should have a basic-ass website with basic-ass contact details on it. Especially in the creative industries. Don’t just rely on a social media presence (especially since that platform is 50% likely to turn Nazi at any even point). Anyway, I’ll need one myself now. Bleh.

The Carnivore Project was the first blog, and the one that came over from Blogger (qv). I wrote about this last year, but it was an old-school blog about meat. I miss this one a lot, and have wrestled with the temptation to bring it back as a physical product of some sort. Fortunately, that itch is scratched by the derth of quality magazines about food culture - even meat culture - that already exist. Magazines like Lucky Peach (RIP), Vittles and Pit are amazing, and they are already producing exactly the sort of stuff I’d like to read (and would aspire to produce). I can sit this one out. Carnivore’s been defunct since 2009, but in the three years it was on Typepad, we picked up 110,000 visits. We had a few regulars, but mostly our traffic came in fits and starts, when bigger fish linked to one of our reviews. The future of The Carnivore Project is to be archived and forgotten in a drive somewhere.

I can’t abide these Jawas.

Pornokitsch is the big fish here. 2,500 posts; 2m+ visits.

It still gets a shocking number of daily visitors. These come for two reasons:

First, because the reviews of Wizard’s First Rule or Wise Man’s Fear specifically will be shared on reddit or baidu or something, and we’ll get a thousand visitors overnight ‘cause the internet loves mean. These two reviews are the gifts that keep on giving, and I’d feel moderately bad about that I had any shame, but they still make me laugh and the works in question aren’t exactly suffering.

Second, Pornokitsch reviewed a whole lot of books, movies and games. Many - if not most - were pretty obscure. The majority of PK’s traffic always came from these ‘long tail’ searches (including being a delightfully frequent reference on Wikipedia).

With those two streams of visitors, Pornokitsch maintained a busy afterlife, despite being ‘defunct’ since 2018.

Here’s the irony part:

I’ve been making the site less usable for years. We felt it was important to keep the articles live, especially that long-tail content. We wanted to continue supporting the discussion around the stuff that was under-discussed. BUT… there was also a risk/reward balance that came from having millions of words of random rambling sitting out there, unrevised and unattended. As we all moved on with our lives and careers, we didn’t want some long-forgotten Snark of Damocles hanging over our heads. Adapting the site so it was ‘search-not-browse’ felt like a good middle ground, and that’s how it had been sitting for several years.

Recently, the site had undergone another change. Anne and I had been fretting about AI scrapers. We were particularly worried about unscrupulous entities training LLMs on the original fiction and non-fiction by guest authors, such as Becky Chambers, Molly Tanzer, Mazin Saleem, Stark Holborn, Adam Roberts and many, many others.

We had published Pornokitsch during a more innocent time, when the worst that could happen to someone’s IP was boring ol’ piracy. But, after some soul-seaching, we realised we were no longer in a position to be effective stewards of Pornokitsch’s content. We lacked the technological know-how (or resource) to protect the work that had been trusted to us. In May, we contacted the authors so they had a chance to download everything they wanted. At the end of July, we exported all the content and then removed virtually all of it from public view.

(Why ‘virtually’? Because I am a terrible person, I left up three pages: our ‘exit interview’ and the aforementioned two reviews. )

Anyway, Pornokitsch was backed up as part of the British Library’s UK Web Archive and is on the Internet Archive as well. I’m in a battle with an overstretched Typepad to download everything too. I’ve secretly always fancied the idea of a retrospective volume. It’ll be twenty years (!) in 2028, and, to be honest, the fact that the content is now no longer freely available may be the nudge we need to bring this about.

gonk but not forgotten

What is notable about all four of these projects is that they were already dead, declining defunct or some combination of all three. I wouldn’t say that any had a ‘legacy’; merely that they all lurked somewhere on a spectrum of digital purgatory. Typepad going under now means I need to take a more active role in shuffling them into the great beyond. To reference the immortal words of Terry Prachett’s Death, we probably should’ve left a little earlier to avoid the rush.

Quick round-up:

An actual book review! By me! The kind folks at The Fantasy Inn let me rave a bit about Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. This won’t be entirely new (I wrote about this book in this very newsletter at an earlier time!), but I think - in an era of resurgant British nationalism, it is valuable to rethink our relationship with our national myths.

Rose Biggin’s Make-Believe and Artifice is out now - you can get a fancy signed copy from the publisher, but it is also on Amazon (et al).

Shelfies passed a year, and co-host Lavie Tidhar shared his favourite shelf to celebrate.

Some literary contributions, a belated event mention, a few things I had nothing to do with, and - of course - a BBQ update.

Make-Believe and Artifice

Make-Believe and Artifice, by Rose Biggin, publishing September 9th from NewCon Press

Rose’s long-overdue inaugural collection. Fifteen absolutely brilliant stories from an immensely talented writer. I don’t really have the words to describe Rose’s work (awkward, what with contributing the book’s foreword), because she is - in the absolute best of ways - ‘all over the place’. She can channel styles and substances and tinker with form and format and flow, but somehow it is always uniquely and immediately Biggin-y. I have an immense amount of respect for her work, and beyond that, I really enjoy it. Highly recommended. 

Worlds of Wonder

Worlds of Wonder, edited by Daniel Hahn, publishing October 28th from Princeton University Press.

A book of essays about the ‘beloved classics of children’s literature’. I had the good fortune to contribute two of them, covering The Dark is Rising and The Sword in the Stone. It was a pleasure to write about both of these books, and even more of a pleasure to re-read them. The Dark is Rising is a funny ol’ book, and, despite being structured as your basic chosen-one-goes-on-a-scavenger-hunt fantasy, really breaks a lot of rules. The emphasis isn’t about a wondrous kingdom away, but on the layers of the fantastical history that can be found in rural Britain. The result is a quest that involves little-to-no-travel, just a little more attention to the world nearby. The other tricksy thing is that the protagonist has virtually no agency. Will is a lump. Things happen to him, or, more often, near him. He watches. In short, it is a fantasy where nobody goes anywhere or does anything, yet it is, undoubtedly, a glorious book.

The Sword in the Stone remains an absolutely glorious book, and truly as good as it gets. I’ve been mildly obsessed with the notion of Arthur and of ‘national myths’ and if/when the twain shall meet, so it is nice to have some of my ramblings on that topic in print. (Somewhat related, I’ve placed an extended review of The Bright Sword, so there will be more on that too.)

Most importantly, of course, I’m now a PRINCETON MAN. Right? That’s how this works? 

As I haven’t updated since Bradford Literature Festival (aka the best of all literature festivals), I held court for a flow of Very Geeky panels, with conversations about witches, vampires (Castlevania: Nocturne - which I recommend so much), and magical histories. Also a less geeky, very serious conversation about surveillance states. As always, what I love about BLF is the food the commitment to mixing people with different backgrounds and perspectives, so all of the conversations went to surprising and delightful places. I say this every year, but it is always true: it was great.

A nice writeup of the panel about Witches:

Witchy Reads at the Bradford Literature Festival 2025

Witchcraft in fiction reveals the raw truths of power, patriarchy, and the enduring cost of being marked as ‘other’

yorkshirebylines.co.uk/society/witchy-reads-at-the-bradford-literature-festival-2025

The phrase ‘midnight leech party’ was lifted from Kirsty Logan, talking about some occultish traditions. The panel agreed it’d be a great album title.

Not sure if I ever shared this, but here’s a conversation from the 2024 festival, chatting about cyberpunk with EJ Swift and Lauren Beukes:

If you’ll pardon the abrupt gear shift, I also did a podcast about stratcomms (I have NO idea why my bandwidth was garbage, but I look like I’m calling in from a maximum security penitentiary) and contributed to some reports on very serious topics. I am, after all, a Princeton Man.

Obligatory Shelfies update. We’re approaching the end of an entire year of Shelfies, which is pretty good for something we started on a whim. Recent contributors include Katiee Hui, Dan Berlinka, Adam Roberts and my dad. Yes, you read that right. Nepotism in publishing! We wanted someone for our July 4th Shelfie that would have a favourite shelf that was about America, and, frankly, there are few people that know more on that topic than my father. (That’s not nepotism, that’s objective truth.) there’s also a tantilising glimpse into his pin collection, which is, in person, terrifyingly impressive!

Finally, something I can’t claim any credit for at all:

Power Play by George E. Osborn

My friend George Osborn’s book, Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence, is now available for pre-order. Pre-orders, of course, make the world go round. So if you’re interesting in any of those topics (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you are), I suggest getting your copy now. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few of the early chapters, and George’s work is provocative and accessible and a great deal of fun. If you’re a subscriber to his VGIM newsletter, you’ll know that already.

I have an uneven relationship with the Hugo Awards, in that, I don’t think very highly of them and they don’t think about me at all. But occasionally they (and by that, I mean the whole hand-wavey institution, voters and all) get something right.

In this case, it was ‘r/fantasy bingo’ being a finalist for Best Related Work this past year. Reddit has a bit of a nasty reputation, which is more or less reasonable: on one hand, it is the last place for actual human answers to questions on the internet. On the other hand, many of those humans are bog trolls. r/fantasy itself is a subreddit of almost four million fantasy fans. The moderation team has the unenviable task of wrangling millions of people who are united only by their love of dragons and somehow making it not a trashfire. The moderators are all volunteers, who give up their own time and peace of mind to try and make a space where people actually can talk about dragons without fear of being hassled by bog trolls. They do so very, very well. 

Last year’s r/fantasy bingo card

Beyond keeping the forum a safe and welcoming place, the moderators go a step further, and try to add some value with AMAs, resources, surveys and the occasional site-wide ‘virtual convention’. The annual r/fantasy Bingo is a long-running challenge that encourages people to read outside their comfort zone. It urges them to find books by LGBTQ+ authors, in translation, from small presses, or even (gasp) not fantasy. The prize for completing a bingo (or even a complete card) is nothing but pride, and there are no formal judging mechanisms beyond self-declaration. But tens of thousands of people participate; sharing recommendations and reviews on the way to ‘turning in’ multiple cards. The most common line is ‘I never would have tried this, but...’ It is one of the most successful discovery campaigns in SF/F today; responsible for broadening the horizons of readers and supporting midlist, forgotten, small press and marginalised authors along the way. 

r/fantasy didn’t win - although the excellent Speculative Whiteness did, so that’s forgivable. The four million strong r/fantasy needs the validation of the Hugos about as much as a shark needs a spoon. Frustratingly, it sounds like the ceremony itself was a bit of a disaster. I feel for all the finalists: that’s your moment (win or not), and it shouldn’t be ruined by bad tech / poor captions / ill-timed laughter / lack of rehearsal. 

Moderators are the invisible first-and-last-line of defense on the internet today. It is a thankless job, and projects like bingo go over and above on delivering it. So, in short: thank you. 

It has been strangely calm, settling back in to ‘ordinary’ BBQ after the competitions. That is, regular, but not continuous, backyard fires. I am, I think, a vastly better cook as a result of the 2025 sprint towards competing. I have also been thinking differently about cooking. The abstract idea of ‘competition’ gives me something to focus on, and encourages me to sharpen my skills in specific ways. 

I think that’s how my mind works. I exercise rigorously when I need to lose weight and have a specific target in mind. And the exercise class I enjoyed most was when I was boxing. I could connect the daily routine with the ultimate goal. Exercise more: weight lost. Exercise more: you punch harder (and hurt less). It isn’t gamification, per se - it is ‘tangibilisation’ (that’s a terrible word, sorry). There are real and positive consequences to my action that are relevant to my every life. Just (waves arms) ‘being healthy’ is unspecific and unmotivating. It is also, now that I think about it, a bit negative: being healthy is about preventing a worse thing, rather than taking steps towards a better thing. Perhaps there’s something behind SMART targets after all.

Anyway, to that end, I have, even in the ‘post-season’, tried to keep improving my BBQ skills - if at a slightly more sedate pace. To that end, I’ve taken a cooking class (with Migrateful, who are the best) to learn how to make dumplings. I’ve signed up for another (with Le Cordon Bleu, as one does, dah-link) to learn proper knife skills. And I spend a disturbing amount watching short videos on the Unilever Food Services app, which is - seriously - a hidden treasure. 

Because I will take any excuse to collect books, I’ve also been enjoying vintage cookbooks. I am particularly fond of the old spiral-bound ones that collect recipes from the ‘sisterhood of [fill in the blank] American religious organisation’. Some true treasures in there. I also came back from Bradford with a new translation of a very old Andalusian cookbook, and managed to tinker with that until I made a - if I say so myself - rather badass lamb dish. I’ll try to share it!

The other noteworthy success was some annoyingly glorious salmon. I say annoyingly because I am convinced that ‘being good at salmon’ is my Monkey’s Paw-style wish. ‘I want to master BBQ’ ... paw curls and (bamf) Jared is really good at fish. FISH! Why not ribs?! WHY, MONKEY PAW, WHYYYYY?! Anyway, curse or not, it was fantastic. I’ll share that too.

Anyway, we’ve got a few non-competition occasions coming up, not least of which is Thanksgiving. I’m excited about them. I feel like there’s a certain standard I’ve set for myself now. 

There’s also a non-food-related-but-BBQ-related thing coming up. I’m excited to share it when it is announced. Watch this space, as it is pretty ridiculous.

Go... (searches rapidly)... Tigers!

Well, my last newsletter, umpteen weeks ago, was a moan about declining readership. Then I went silent for ages. I’m aware probably looks like I was off on a massive sulk. Far from it!

First, everyone was LOVELY. The number of kind emails I received were really touching. I really wasn’t feeling sorry for myself - honest! I’m aware that newsletters, like podcasts, are notoriously non-transparent. Given the state of the internet (RIP), I think owned channels are all the more important, especially those (like newsletters) that don’t rely on an algorithmic intermediary for discovery.

The problem is, it is very, very hard to measure what ‘good’ means in this space. As with all other ‘businesses’ (especially content and double-especially online content), the only stories you can find are stories of unabashed success: ‘I started a newsletter and now I have 80,000 subscribers and live in Hampstead’. There isn’t a lot of ‘I’ve been flailing for two years and mostly it is my family and a dozen strangers still confused about the lack of to dinosaurs’. ‘I’ve plateaued at relative mediocrity - AMA!’

Anyway, as someone firmly occupying the most mid of middle ground, I thought it’d be interesting to share what middling looks like. It mids! That’s ok!

First-and-two, I’m actually not sure how (if?) to escape said middling. I’m not going to lie: having 80,000 subscribers would be lovely. Mostly for my ego, but also because it’d make a sexxxy-ass platform for pitching and selling other projects. But I have very few other channels with which to fuel this one: my social media is pared back to nothing, and my work doesn’t really condone rampant self-promotion. Starting another channel solely to fuel newsletter growth sounds like turtles all the way down.

First-and-three, Beehiiv, at the free level (hi!), is pretty bare bones. It absolutely does what it should do, which I appreciate. And it isn’t trying to canoodle itself into being a social media platform, which was part of my issue with Substack (the other part being Nazis, but, to be fair, they seem to have gotten past that awkward adolescence). But a lot of the nice to haves - custom domains, website design - are at the paid level, which is, I think $49/month. That’s a pretty hefty commitment. Once you hit 2,500 subscribers, you have to upgrade. In my head, I was waiting for that point, because I think that volume does justify the investment. But I can’t see that happening. Maybe with access to their advertising features, but those are only available at the paid level, so… (Were I beehiiv, I’d probably cut that particular Gordian knot by allowing partial access to advertising features. If they’re confident that the features work, it’d be in everyone’s best interest! But presumably they don’t want their in-line ad inventory flooded with crap, which, again, fair enough.)

First-and-four, this is not my only newsletter! Shelfies is, of course, going well. What Shelfies has going for it (see 1.2, above) is an Instagram account. (To be clear: Meta’s a noxious, toxic presence and it pains me to use any of their products. I’ve somewhat rationalised it because I think Shelfies is a tiny force for good, but, let’s be clear: I hate myself.) @shelfies.please didn’t send any subscribers to the newsletter at first, but there seems to have been be a tipping point, and it now sends a few new subscribers each week. That’s pretty small, but I’m interested to see if that continues and/or scales.

First-and-five, speaking of Meta being a noxious, toxic presence, has anyone else clocked the title of Nick Clegg’s new book? Clegg’s spent the last seven years as Meta’s Global VP of Whitewashing and Distraction. In case you were hiding under the floorboards, his period of service includes such highlights as denying Russian electoral interference, burying Facebook’s role in the Rohignya genocide, lying about pernicious misinformation and polarisation, maligning whistleblowers, overseeing and ending fact checking ahead of the 2024 election, and - as a swan song - defending the rollback of hate speech protections in January 2025.

Clegg’s doing a reputational recovery tour now that he’s departing Meta, and his messianic book is clearly part of that. But let’s be clear: he’s already made 19 million pounds from Meta, and has at least that much still tied up in shares. When he makes grand pronouncements about weakening AI protections for the creative sector - six months after Meta got caught scraping its own users, the broader internet, and 7.5 million pirated books - he’s still serving the same same master: his dividentds.

Nick Clegg is an expert on ‘how to save the internet’, in the same way that a fox knows exactly how to save chickens. But at the tick-carpeted vermin that scrounge Morley’s bags from my bin at least have the common decency not boast about it.

That comparison was really cruel to foxes. This is our local fox, Scrap,and I adore him.
There were other analogies I could’ve used, but this one seemed the least likely to get me sued.

ANYWAY, the second reason this newsletter is so behind: I’ve been busy - see below. And given that the newsletter was in a, um, liminal state, I took the opportunity to park it for a bit so I could deliver a few other bits and pieces. One of the reasons I prefer not to (and recommend not to) professionalise (all) my hobbies is that it is like juggling. And sometimes you need to let one of those balls hit the ground. Best when your balls only belong to you and other people aren’t waiting on them and oh god my analogy game is really troubling today.

some BBQ hijinks

Obviously the update you were all waiting for!

Perdido Street Bacon had their first outing as a competitive BBQ team at The Whole Hog Competition (part of the Malton Food and Drink Festival). We did surprisingly well in some categories (sausage! pulled pork! mystery box!) and embarrassingly poorly in others (my ribs went wrong). The overall result was the most mid-table of finishes, and we’re really proud. Paul and I spent months prepping and practicing. Months! There’s a spreadsheet!!!

We had so much fun that, when the opportunity arose, we did it again two weeks later, at the UK BBQ Championships at Hayle’s Fruit Farm. Despite the prestigious title, this was a smaller competition… but also a much more ruthless one: we were the only BBQ rookies, and up against an amazing mix of international teams and British legends. And we middled it AGAIN, with great results in the burger and ‘non-meat’ rounds. (We also had a chance to judge, as there was a separate, KCBS competition happening the following day. That was some good eatin’.)

There’s a longer write-up lurking about, but - in short - this was an absolutely brilliant time. The BBQ community were immensely welcoming, we made a lot of new friends and picked up some new skills. PSB will ride again.

some non-BBQ hijinks

I was given the challenge of choosing the ‘five best Cyberpunk novels’ by Five Books. I fell back on the timeless strategy of pummeling a straw man, in this case, the (fairly well-debunked) notion that ‘cyberpunk is dead’. The five works were all published between Neuromancer (inclusive) and now, demonstrating how the genre has been doing nicely thank-you-very-much.

I also, I now realise, included one novella and one collection amongst the ‘novels’. All things considered, I was terrible at following the brief. It was a lot of fun: being interviewed will never get old, and being interviewed really, really well is a joy.

For true cyberpunk enthusiasts, last year’s panel at Bradford Literature Festival - featuring Lauren Beukes, EJ Swift and myself - is now available as a podcast. My memory being what it is, I don’t remember too much of what we said. Lauren and Emma were clever, Lauren hated my t-shirt, and I think the audience asked better questions than I did. Typical panel, really. (More on Bradford below.)

Not sure the last time I shared one of these, but Anne and I continue our ‘In The Weeds’ column for ParSec, tilting at all our favourite publishing windmills. Issue #12 saw us saying goodbye to The Kitschies and talking about when and why institutions should call it day. Issue #13’s contribution is about the power of ‘tropes’ and, more broadly, the rise of romantasy.

Outside of the publishing world - a couple of interesting presentations as well: a Pitch Perfect-themed presentation about, er, pitching for Bethnal Green Ventures (dad-joke gone awry, I’m afraid) and a couple of talks about misinformation (fewer Anne Kendrick references).

Finally, I’ve joined the Commission for the Future of Inclusion and Belonging in Multi-ethnic Newham as one of the expert commissioners (bonus: also a Newham resident). This is an independent body, that will be conducting research and providing recommendations to the Mayor of Newham. We’re not a shy group, and I look forward to exploring the findings with the other experts and residents.

what’s coming up

Bradford Literature Festival (This is going to be a heavy suitcase.)

I’ll be at the Bradford Literature Festival this weekend! I am, as always, immensely excited by my annual pilgrimage to great food. I mean culture. (But also food.)

The programme is out now, and I’ll be chairing four different literary events:

• Witchy Reads with Kirsty Logan, Dr Michael Stewart and Molly Aitken

• Writing Castlevania Nocture with Testament and Clive Bradley

• Haunted Histories with Shubnum Khan and Genevieve Cogman

• Surveillance States with Professor Hassan Ugail and Jake Hurfurt

I’ll also be chairing a session on creative technology at the Creative Economic Conference - and wandering about as many of the other panels as I can! If you see me, please say hi. I’ll undoubtedly be stuffing my face, but am always happy to chat!

Looking much further ahead, I’ll be in LA and San Francisco in late July: if you need a specialist hand-waver to hand-wave about cyberpunk (or BBQ) (or misinformation), please get in touch!

Cast your mind back to January, my decision to enact Project V and trial the ‘dot-dot-dash’ format: weekly rambles and a monthly deep dive. Ten weeks later, the results are in, and they aren’t great.

Let’s EVALUATE!

summons back all the planners who had been totally excluded from the process since writing the creative brief

Let’s start with the data, and, oh.

The Boob of Doom

Well, that’s probably not good.

I don’t conduct exit interviews. However, I think it is safe to guess that:

• Some readers that didn’t want to read this newsletter every week

• Some readers that joined for a key moment (probably cyberpunk) and the increased frequency acted as reminders to finally unsubscribe

Well, that’s still ok, right?

I don’t want to fall into a type of reverse survivorship bias. The people that left are gone! I should be worried more about the people that stayed, right? As long as they’re satisfied, I can find more people like them.

How can I tell if they’re happy? If I’m simply shedding ‘casual’ or ‘accidental’ readers, those were the low-engagement folks. As they depart, my engagement metrics should actually rise and…

[No image here, but imagine something along these lines.]

Oh.

If I was only losing unengaged readers, the % of people opening and/or clicking should be on the rise. But those numbers - although not breasting boobily into the abyss - aren’t much better. I’m not just shedding the chaff, I’m boring the wheat as well.

Now I have to account for the strong possibilities that:

• Some readers didn’t want to read this format

• Some active readers didn’t want to read this content

And you know what? That’s fair enough. Let’s park the misery for a moment and talk about two positive outcomes.

First, I have heard directly from more people over the past two months. Which is amazing! I love getting emails back. Yes, I’m terrible at replying (promptly/at all), but I love it!

Second, I’ve hit ten straight weeks of delivering weekly! One goal was to build better writing habits, and it happened! Not counting Paul’s excellent guest post, I managed to get 25k of ‘incremental and incidental’ newsletter writing done: that’s writing just for the heck of it. That’s a long way from Adam Roberts (seriously, what is UP with that guy?), but I’m pleased.

Basically, all the metrics might be shite, but the process evaluation is glowing! Look at all the exclamation marks! We can work with this!

Let’s go back to objectives. What do I need from this newsletter?

• Writing practice. For personal satisfaction and betterment, but this isn’t a diary. I need to work on writing for an audience.

• A platform. I’m starting to loathe that word. I’m genuinely blessed with a lot of platforms - editorial matter in anthologies, columns in magazines, articles in books, talks to willing (and occasionally unwilling) audiences. But they’re scatty and fragmented and slow. At the end of the day, I need a (flails) thing-place that can collect (if not cohere) the stuff I do, and allow me to talk about and around that stuff. And, let’s be honest, I want a thing-place that helps me get more things.

The dot-dot-dash format was one tidy way of achieving both objectives. Weekly emails gave me regular writing practice. And each indidivual email that covered the scatty, fragmented things I like to write about (strategy, books, bbq,…) in a light-touch way.

But it ain’t working. FINE. BE THAT WAY.

The new plan!

Here’s what I propose:

• Drop back to fortnightly (data says so) - so two monthly emails

• Longer reads (‘cause I still have opinions. So many opinions.)

• One email will focus on strategy, and also include the ‘interesting links’ round-up

• One email will focus on books and book reviews, and also include the BBQ updates

This is slightly bipolar, but feels like a manageable split. Those feel like the obvious groupings, and both seem ‘useful’ - both to me and to you.

Your thoughts, please.

Would this approach work for you?

And, yes, I’m overthinking it, but (whispers) that’s part of the fun.

I’m going to keep the ‘What Genre Am I?’ survey open for a little while longer. 

I will say that (by design) we’ve got some contentious ones in here. Is Red Rising fantasy or science fiction? What about Frankenstein? Or the Civilisation game series? Some very interesting answers. (Also a shout out to the person that commented ‘why’.) (I DON’T KNOW.)

what I’m cooking

• Two more pork tenderloins. Or ‘fillets’ as some would have it. These are at the sweet spot of a) good BBQ practice, b) quick to cook (evenings, not weekend), c) really healthy (zero Weight Watchers points!), d) cheap ( <£4 at Lidl!). Are they great? …no. They’re fine. In the culinary ecosystem of our home, they’re filler: basically interchangeable with chicken breast, but for half the price. If Big Tenderloin are looking for a spokesperson that can stand up on camera and be like ‘this right here could be your generic weekday protein!’, they’re welcome to call my agent.

• All the thighs. ALL OF THEM. Why are chicken thighs so good? Wait, I know. Everything I said about pork tenderloin applies to chicken thighs except the healthy part, and, yeah, that’s where the action is. They’re quick and yummy to smoke. As my BBQ Better Half Paul points out, they’re great at holding flavour. Basically they’re a canvas for whatever spicy mad science you’re keen to try.

• Mutton. There’s a community farm nearby and every week I diligently buy one stupidly oversized gourd from them. Two weeks ago, it was an actual big ass pumpkin. I laboriously chopped it up and then used that as a massive gourdy bed for a mutton leg. Turns out that pumpkin, slowly boiled in fatty sheep goo, is pretty exceptional.

• Brisket. My local Lidl does £10 briskets. I was dubious, but you know what? They’re not huge, by any means, and they’re slightly overly trimmed, so you have to be careful, but… they feed 3-4 and they’re pretty great value for money. Anyway, absolutely killed it with this one. Intolerably smug, etc. Actually, screw Big Tenderloin, maybe Lidl should sponsor me?

And finally… a newsletter that’s doing really well!

Shelfies is six months old and is ticking along very nicely.

We’re on Instagram now (I KNOW I HATE MYSELF FOR IT), where these candid shots of well-loved books are a very, very, very interesting counterbalance to the perfectly composed shelves of #bookstagram. Authenticity vs aspiration! CHOOSE YOUR SIDE. Or don’t! But please do follow and share; we’re proud of this little go-er.

Shelfies

The stories about your books. Collected by Lavie and Jared.

shelfies.beehiiv.com

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This month’s comes courtesy of Dr Paul Graham Raven, who is oft-quoted in this newsletter. I was very pleased when he offered his thoughts on ‘fandom intensity’. Comments and questions? Let me know, and I’ll include them next week. Now, over to Paul…

I have a hypothesis which explains the difference in intensity that Jared recently noted between fandoms attached to science fiction and/or fantasy franchises and fandoms attached to, for instance, crime fiction. My hypothesis starts from a definition of the distinction that separates those categories: crime fiction is generally primary world fiction, which is to say it’s set in the world that the reader broadly assumes to be their own, while sf/f is generally secondary world fiction, which is to say that it’s set in a world (or even universe) other than the one in which the reader actually lives.

(For the sake of simplicity, I’m leaving aside hybrid genres, such as romantasy or sf crime, which borrow generic forms traditionally attached to primary world settings, and redeploy them in secondary worlds. That said, the theory holds if you assume that hybrid genres are always secondary world fictions; for the purposes of this particular argument, the setting matters more than the plot tropes.)

The simplest statement of the hypothesis might go something like this: a secondary world fandom is more intense because it has a unique thing to bond over (i.e. that imagined secondary world) which is all but impossible to understand, or even to access, as an outsider to the fandom. This barrier to entry becomes more intense the larger the franchise becomes, for much the same reason that the volume of a sphere expands at a faster rate than its surface area.

Let us imagine a n00b (who has read one Discworld book, perhaps) listening in on a table full of Pratchett fans. Our n00b will know few of the characters or events under discussion, but such new-to-them characters and events can be described fairly easily in response to an enquiry, in pretty much the same way as character or event from the Sherlock Holmes franchise might be easily described.

Now, a n00b to either of those fandoms will ask lots of further questions, which will shift their focus from characters and events (or ‘plot’) to a more contextual enquiry, as they try to make sense (and/or a system) of said characters and events. They're trying to piece together and extrapolate the implied world of the stories, based on the parts they've seen so far.

In a primary world franchise like Sherlock Holmes, the canonical works are set in a historical version of the world in which the text—the book, the TV show, or whatever—itself exists. So, while there might be questions (whether asked aloud or kept to oneself) about why these characters talk like this, or why law enforcement or international travel works in this particular way, most of them can be answered with “because Victorian-era London”. 

To be clear, Victorian London is an increasingly distant and inexplicable world for most people alive today, and I'm sure historians would justifiably be keen to point out just how much we misconstrue it—with media properties such as the Holmes franchise, now out of copyright and thus out of control, very much implicated in such misconstruals, if only in part.

Nonetheless, for all but the most ignorant or stubborn of novitiate fans, there is an ontological finality to “because Victorian-era London”. It is an established fact that the original works were set (and, in some cases, written) in that particular timespace, by an author well-acquainted with it; questions about the context in which the stories play out are therefore ably answered this way, which opens the door for our hypothetical n00b to investigate further into said historical timespace (if they are so inclined) via the means of historical documentation and discussions which may not have anything to do with the Holmes franchise.

(Of course, there's a whole genre of history texts written to target exactly this sort of enquirer, which will use the fictional franchise as a key to their contextual interest... but let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be.)

Other primary-world fandoms have similar ontological boundaries—boundaries which abut the world the reader knows, albeit at what may be considerable distance in terms of time and/or space and/or socioeconomic circumstance. For Jane Austen fans, for instance, the equivalent answer might be “because the Napoleonic war”, but all such answers are subsets of a meta-answer which (so I'm given to understand) will be very familiar to anyone who has been the parent of small children: “because that's just how it is/was”. This is an appeal to concrete reality—or at least to a shared socially-constructed reality.

The point being, you could ask a historian of Victorian London—or, in earlier years, someone who experienced it first-hand—those same contextual questions about language or law enforcement as observed in the canonical Holmes texts, and likely get answers which matched fairly well with the implied world of the fictions. To put it another way, those books depict events and characters whose contextual logics would make sense even to those who have not read them; the texts partake of a world which does not depend upon said texts for its existence.

In narratological terms, then, these texts (i.e. Holmes books or movies or whatever) contain stories and narratives (e.g. accounts of investigations that hinge upon dogs not barking when one might expect them to) which in turn imply a world (or, more strictly, a fabula). That implied world is—modulo certain acts of creative license, plus the scientific and social misprisions of its era of production—a known quantity, a documented and real timespace accessible through multiple channels of enquiry. In other words, you can learn about the London of Sherlock Holmes without reading more Sherlock Holmes.

Returning to our table of Pratchett fans, things play out slightly differently. Rather than reaching moments of epistemological closure and comfort via the touchstone of history, the questions of the n00b will instead encounter moments of WTF and sensawunda. Rather than “because Victorian-era London”, for instance, they'll reach “because Death is a person”, or “because the Discworld is not only flat, but supported by four cardinal elephants stood on the back of a giant turtle”. Further questions (which will likely be of the general form “wait, what, why?!”) will only result in further revelations which demand further explanations. There is no point at which “that's just how it is/was” can work quite as it does for the Holmes novitiate, namely as an appeal to a reality which is shared beyond the borders of the franchise and its fandom. 

To the contrary: with Pratchett’s world (or Tolkien’s, or the world of Sailor Moon, or whatever world it might be) ontological questions can only be answered by reference to sources within the franchise and/or fandom. More simply, you can’t learn more about Discworld without reading more Discworld, or engaging with secondary literatures or fandom discourses which are, in essence, an extension of it.

I hypothesise, then, that it is exactly this sense of being party to an arcane (and, if not exactly secret, then certainly obscure) imaginary ontology—of being party to a secondary world, if only at the distance necessarily sustained by its representation in various media—that pushes such fandoms to a greater intensity of collective activity, engagement and obsession than those of primary-world franchises. If you want to know more, there is nowhere to go but further in.

(The reader of reasonable intuition, and perhaps of experience with the social dynamics of knowledge and status, will likely also see that this may well also be why secondary-world fandoms tend to be far more savage and fractious, particularly but not exclusively with regard to questions regarding canonicity. Comparisons to religious sectarianism could stand accused of being both lazy and invidious, but presumably not by any honest person with any experience of fandom. Don’t @ me.)

Another way to come at this question is through the idea of curation. Fictional worlds, primary and secondary, are built—but they are also maintained. This could be said to be true of the primary worlds of pop stars and soap operas just as much as of fictional detectives. The work of Taylor Swift implies a world, for example, of which Swift herself is the central organisational (and narratological) axis; that world is ‘our’ world, in a sense, but it is Swift’s world in another. But it is not exclusively hers; it belongs to, and is built and maintained (and sometimes fought over) by her fandom.

This is why my good friend and fellow theorist Jay Springett argues that we should consider worlds to be the definitive medium of the C21st, and that the job of managing and curating them—a role to which he assigns the wonderfully science-fiction-fantasy label of “worldrunner”—is a new form of artistic practice, to which the original worldbuilder may not be suited by either skill or temperament.

Returning to my own domain of interest, it also tells us something about the competing visions of futurity that proliferate in popular culture. Human futures are primary worlds, in that they abut temporally with the ‘real’ world, but they are also secondary worlds in that, because they do not (yet) exist, they can only be accessed through the works of their creators, curators, and fans.

What happens when the vision of the person (or organisation) that created a future no longer aligns with the vision of some or all of its ‘fans’? Well, you might end up with what fandoms sometimes call a canon war—but which the rest of us might recognise under the broader but just as accurate label of politics.

Dr. Paul Graham Raven is a writer, researcher and critical futures consultant, whose work is concerned with how the stories we tell about times to come can shape the lives we end up living. Paul is also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, a collaborator with designers and artists, and an artist in his own right. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and too many books. 

Professional stuff can be found at paulgrahamraven.com. You can follow his futures work at his online research journal, Worldbuilding Agency; or you can wade into the turbid ramblings of his two-decades-vintage personal blog at Velcro City Tourist Board.