A Meal of Thorns

A deeply strange and arresting short novel, The Water Statues defies easy categorization but has a powerful and cerebral atmosphere, putting us in mind of a lot of other works—including Clarke’s Piranesi. Langdon Hickman, last unshriven host of Death // Sentence, joins to discuss.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Langdon Hickman

Title: The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhedeff 

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Recent episodes with other Death // Sentence hosts (Sisyphean with Gareth Watkins & Diaspora with Eden Kupermintz)

Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume

Roberto Bolaño

W.G. Sebald'sAusterlitz & The Rings of Saturn

Hugo Nominees, UKLG Nominees

Frank Herbert’s Dune

Holism vs reductivist materialism

Object oriented ontology & speculative realists

Nick Land, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton

Set theory

Jacques Derrida on “logos”

Greg Egan's Incandescence & related stories

Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen

Kim Stanley Robin’s Aurora (AMOT episode w/ Hilary Strang)

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy of Djinn and Miskatonic

M.R. James

Eugene Thacker’s An Ideal For Living

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi(AMOT episode w/Misha Grifka Wander) & Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Hemingway’s “Iceberg theory”

Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett

Decadent & Aesthetic movements

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Negative Capability

Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 1818

Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sofia Samatar

David Michell’s Cloud Atlas (AMOT episode with Abigail Nussbaum)

William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

Hilary Putnam

The Caretaker by Doon Arbus

Death // Sentence

Treble Zine

Consequence of Sound

Langdon's newsletter

More famous for his science fiction and dark fantasy, Ray Bradbury also tried his hand at crime fiction, with often-fascinating results. Writer, critic, and editor Aigner Loren Wilson talks us through the strange flourishes and tonal experiments of Killer, Come Back To Me!

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Aigner Loren Wilson

Title: Killer, Come Back To Me by Ray Bradbury

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

The Possession of Alba Díaz & Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues

The Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction by Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce

Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett

Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles

Damon Knight

"The Smallest Assassin"

Leigh Brackett

The Chucky franchise

Frank Miller’s Sin City, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

"Dead Men Rise Up never"

"Where Everything Ends"

"The Town Where No One Got Off"

"The Utterly Perfect Murder"

The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller

"Punishment Without Crime"

"The Whole Town’s Sleeping" & "At Midnight in the Month of June"

"The Women" from I Sing the Body Electric

"And So Died Riabouchinska"

"The Smiling People"

"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl"

"Some Live Like Lazarus"

Octavia E. Butler

Darker Times

Writing Skins, Aigner’s newsletter

Aigner's website

Scene Builder

In this con-coverage episode, Casella talks to folks at Readercon in Boston, including Lisa from Narrated, author Sara S. Messenger, and editor Carl Engle-Laird. We also visit Porter Square Books, an indie bookstore that has recently launched their own book review.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Readercon

Porter Square Books

Lisa from the Narrated podcast

The Hugo Awards

Elizabeth Bear’s White Space series

C.J. Cherryh & Lois McMaster Bujold

Sara S. Messenger

“Jennifer’s Daughter” in Nightmare Magazine

“When We Loved Giants” in Lightspeed

Karel Čapek

Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (good AMOT episode on that!)

AMOT episode on Ready Player One

Clark Seanor’s “Recycled Air: Wayfarers and the Tyranny of the Everyday” in Strange Horizons

Lovestruck Books in last year’s Readercon episode

Katherine @ Porter Square Books

K.A. Applegate’s Animorphsseries

Chuck Tingle

Ann Patchett’s Whistler

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

Roseanna Pendlebury’s review of Sour Cherry

Sunny Moraine (from our Pattern Recognition episode)

Will McMahon

Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast

Benjamin Rosenbaum (from our Fire Logic episode)

Carl Engle-Laird, editor at Tor

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Jon Bois’ 17776

Cambridge Porchfest & the Good Trouble Brass Band

Gracenote & Broadsheet coffee

Thomas Wensma has an interview with Australian barista champ Jack Simpson & coffee farmer Juan Pablo Campos about the Ombligon cultivar at Perfect Daily Grind, if that caught your ear

Bujold’s Vorkosigan series & Barrayar

Josh Cook of Porter Square Books & the Porter Square Review of Books

PSB’s Bluesky

Josh’s articles at LitHub

Poly Barton’s What Am I, A Deer?

Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps & Acid Green Velvet

Literary agent and Print Run podcaster extraordinaire Laura Zats is on to talk about a novel that is the most urban fantasy you can imagine, and yet seems to run towards different traditions and ideas the closer you examine it—Robin McKinley’s award-winning but under-discussed Sunshine.

 

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

 

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Laura Zats

Title: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Christopher Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief & Between Two Fires

Peter Rock's Makeshift

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Totally not the heist film Oceans 11

Newberry Honor & Mythopoeic Award

Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries/Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series

Kim Harrison

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Twilight & Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series

Dunning-Kruger effect

McKinley's Deerskin

Editor Sharyn November & the Firebird imprint

Charles De Lint, Anne Rice, Anita Blake

"Contemporary Fantasy"

Stephen Graham Jones

Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires & Horrorstör

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Matt Kirkland’s “Dracula Daily”

RS Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”

Lee Mandelo's The Woods All Black

Indra Das's The Devourers

John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids

The Print Run podcast

Erik Hane's “The Fandom Strain”

Critic & reviewer Ian Mond talks us through Tiny Deaths, a very funny and frequently morbid collection. We also think bigger: about the place and status of humor and seriousness in genre literature, and why non-genre imprints and translated literature might be places to look for this energy.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Ian Mond

Title: Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

The Writer and The Critic

Tayari Jones’ Kin

Boyhood by David Keenan

Centreouropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery

Edward Royston’s Transgressing Time

Christopher Priest's The Recollections

Priest & Allan’s The Illuminated Man

Sturgeon's Law (“90% of everything is crap”)

Dr. Who & Stephen King

Gallifrey One convention

Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, T.C. Boyle, Kelly Link

Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture

Rachel Khong’s My Dear You

The Simpsons

Blindness by José Saramago, Julio Cortázar

Shearman’s Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special, and We All Hear Stories in the Dark

“Chimes At Midnight” and “The Holy Terror”

Douglas Adams

Machine of Death, edited by Ryan North

Jon Stone’s The Monster At The End Of This Book

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria

Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis

James Morrow's Towing Jehovah & Only Begotten Daughter

Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”

Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Stories

Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis

Michael Swanwick & Jeffrey Ford collections

"Gate 9" in Pandemonium Waltz

Hilary Leichter, Sayaka Murata, Liliana Colanzi

Translated Hugo Initiative

Words Without Borders

Locus Award for Best Translated Novel

Isaac Fellman's Notes From A Regicide

Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Sean McTiernan's SFUltra

Locus Magazine

Ian's Substack & Facebook & Goodreads