The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 14: Gwynne Garfinkle

 

Reading Pleasures of 2025

by Gwynne Garfinkle

 

 

 

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. Jamie, a trans witch and grad student, teaches her mother Serena to do magic, in the hope it will help her move on from years of grieving her late wife, Jamie's other mom. But while Serena readily takes to witchcraft, this disrupts Jamie's life in ways she never could have imagined. The novel interweaves Jamie's present-day narrative with the story of her mothers, starting in the 1990s, along with (fictional) excerpts from the 18th-century English literature that is the subject of her dissertation. (As a long-time fan of Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel, I loved this novel's celebration of 18th-century women writers.) Anders' writing is brilliant, quirky, and full of heart.

 

John Wiswell, Wearing the Lion. This deft, profoundly empathetic retelling of the labors of Heracles is by turns delightful and devastating. Good-natured Heracles is clueless that his adored Auntie Hera can't stand him (because he's a reminder of Zeus's philandering). Her lashing out inadvertently leads to the death of Heracles's children, and Hera sends him on quest after quest in an attempt to hide her guilt. What follows is a wonderful tale of found family and lovable monsters, including an affable hydra and a lion named Purrseus. I kept wanting to give Heracles a hug. (The audiobook, narrated by Elizabeth Klett and Christian Black, is superb.)

 

Nisi Shawl, The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox (2024). As a one-time Kerouac nerd, I was eager to read this speculative novella inspired by Alene Lee, the Black writer Kerouac used as the basis for the character of Mardou in The Subterraneans. Shawl centers Mardou's voice by telling her story in journal entries. In one passage, Mardou recounts how Leo (Kerouac) sent a story of hers to his publisher without her permission, and, even worse, "added his own ending. A collaboration, he called it." Mardou's mystical experiences add another dimension to this unique book.

 

Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots. An exquisite tale about sisterly love and the magic of music, based on the murder ballad "The Cruel Sister." Contemporary stories about faerie are often not my jam, but this one enchanted me. The hardcover edition is gorgeous, with illustrations by Kathleen Neeley.

 

Sarah Gailey, Spread Me. This wild ride of a novella is a queer, erotic take on The Thing, replete with unsettling body horror. Very weird, tense, and riveting.

 

 

 

Rachel Harrison, Play Nice. When Clio's estranged mother Alex dies, Clio decides to renovate her childhood home, which Alex claimed to be haunted. In the process, Clio unearths buried family secrets, as well as the truth about the entity living in the house. More ambitious in structure than Harrison's previous works, this novel includes sections from Alex's paranormal tell-all book about her side of the story.

 

Paul Tremblay, Another. A preteen artist with an anxiety disorder is gradually replaced by a doppelganger, and his parents don't seem to notice or care. Tremblay's first foray into middle-grade fiction is creepy and genuinely upsetting, but it's also a heartwarming paean to the power of making art.

 

Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together. This compulsively readable novel blends autofiction and true crime reportage, amplifying both stories in the process. Kraus's exploration of class, social media, and addiction sometimes makes for an uncomfortable read, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book.

 

Marian Engel, Bear (1976). My favorite backlist discovery of the year. When I saw its lurid mass-market paperback cover on Bluesky--an erotic novel about a woman and a bear?!--I was not expecting this quiet masterpiece (which won the Governor General's Literary Award). I really must read more by Engel.

 

Sienna Tristen, Hortus Animarum: A New Herbal for the Queer Heart (2022). These prose poems are so full of sonic lusciousness, I couldn't stop highlighting phrases in the ebook. From "white bindweed": "I am sick to my mallowbee stomach with watching them try & control you for oh how I cherish my nosenudge in the throat of your corolla, oh how I treasure the ephemeral scent of your rarefied afternoon high--oh how I love a thing that flourishes best in disturbed earth." (Hat tip to Mary Soon Lee, who chose this chapbook for SFWA's poetry book club.)

 

Maggie Nelson, Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth. I've been dealing with jaw dysfunction for years, so I was curious about this account of Nelson's efforts to find a cure for hers. Melding everyday life and dreams, this lyrical work is a meditation on pain and the desperation to find relief. Nelson discusses in rueful detail the quack treatments she contemplates against her better judgment. She writes: "Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about all these years, if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking about the pain. Then I remember that I’ve thought about a lot of other things as well. Also, I'm not sure the goal of life is to think about as many things as possible." This year Nelson also published the slim volume The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, an incisive study of ambition, fame, misogyny, poetry, and pop culture.

 

Chloe Caldwell, Trying. Like Pathemata, this memoir uses a specific medical issue (infertility) as a jumping-off point for an unpredictable journey. Halfway through the book, which Caldwell wrote in real time, her marriage crashes and burns, and her life (and the book) opens up as she reclaims her queer identity.

 

Eleanor Johnson, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980). This study of domestic horror would have benefited from a more intersectional analysis. Still, Johnson's discussion of the status of reproductive rights, laws against marital rape and domestic abuse, and the Equal Rights Amendment when films like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Stepford Wives were released is illuminating.

 

Becky Siegel Spratford (editor), Why I Love Horror: Essays on Horror Literature. This wide-ranging collection includes personal essays by such horror luminaries as Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Gabino Iglesias, and Alma Katsu.

 

Patti Smith, Bread of Angels. I'm currently savoring Patti Smith's latest memoir, a life-spanning self-portrait of the artist, in prose both gritty and luminous. Smith is a national treasure; in these tough times, I'm grateful for her enduring voice.

 

Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a novel, Can't Find My Way Home (2022), and two collections, Singing, Singing (2024) and People Change (2018), all published by Aqueduct Press. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Apex, Penumbric, and Not One of Us.

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.13: Cheryl Morgan

 

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025

 by Cheryl Morgan

The trouble with running a publishing company is that you end up reading lots of books that you can’t review. Not to mention a whole bunch of books that may never get published. This has been cutting down the amount of reading for review that I can do a lot.

Having said that, I’d like to start this year by heaping praise on something we did publish. I am truly honored to have Chaz Brenchley’s Of the Emperor’s Kindness in our catalogue. It is an amazing piece of work.

Chaz, of course, has been around a long time. One of the dreams for a small press is to discover someone brilliant at the start of their career. My friend, Francesca Barbini, who runs Luna Press Publishing, did that with Lorraine Wilson. Raine, as she prefers to be called, has now made the step up to working with Solaris, and she has produced two fabulous novels for them. We Are All Ghosts in the Forest and The Salt Road are set in a post-collapse world which is haunted by the ghosts of things on the internet. Quite how that can be is never explained, but I think that just adds to the atmosphere.

This has been a year in which there is a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. That’s always a cause for celebration. Written on the Dark lives up to the very high standards that Kay sets for himself. Novels by Nalo Hopkinson are rather less frequent, but Blackheart Man has finally seen print and is well worth the many years I have been waiting for it.

I am trying to read more books by trans people because I worry that, in the current political environment, they will be finding it very difficult to sell new work. Charlie Jane Anders is perhaps the highest profile trans writer these days, and I think that Lessons in Magic & Disaster is the best thing she has done. M M Olivas is at the start of her career, but Sundown in San Ojuela is a very promising piece of horror that I think should appeal to fans of Liz Hand.

 

Other novels that have stood out for me over the past year are The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield, Alien Clay by the amazingly prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear, and Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison.

I have been reading a lot of novellas because they are short and that enables me to up my review count. I had to do some catch up for award season, and very much enjoyed The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djèlí Clark. However, it is my personal opinion that The Practice, The Horizon and the Chain by Sophia Samatar should have won all the awards.

For this year I am continuing to enjoy various ongoing novella series including The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older, The Gnomes of Lychford by Paul Cornell, What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher and A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo.

I have been reading a lot of Welsh folklore of late, primarily because of an anthology we will be publishing next year. Most of these tales are at best short story length, and often mere vignettes, but there is plenty of potential in them. To experience the true weirdness (and queerness) of Welsh myth, however, you need to read The Mabinogion. It is seriously strange and has some amazing gender explorations.

 

Most of my non-fiction reading has been about the ancient world, and feminist. Immaculate Forms by Helen King is a history of medical views of women’s bodies from Classical Greece forward. Honestly, men, what were you thinking? Mythica, by Emily Hauser, is a wonderful history of Bronze Age Europe told through the lens of the women of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. And Carthage by Eve MacDonald asks what we can know about this famous ancient civilisation (founded by a woman) given that the Romans utterly destroyed its written culture.

More generally I enjoyed Queer as Folklore by my friend and sometime colleague, Sacha Coward, which won the non-fiction prize in this year’s British Fantasy Awards. I also liked Patriarchy Inc. by Cordelia Fine, despite the unfortunate fact that a book that points out the shortcomings of DEI initiatives is now rather redundant.

The standout TV series of the year was Kaos. All of my Classicist friends absolutely loved it, and I can see why. I am distraught that it got cancelled because it robbed us of a resolution of the storylines. Ari & Dion 4 Ever!

The TV version of Murderbot seemed to work well, though I will always prefer the books. Somewhat to my surprise, the TV version of Foundation (to which I am late, and of which I have only seen season 1 so far) is not a hot mess, and is much better than the books.

There have been various Marvel TV shows and movies released this year, but the only one I would recommend is Thunderbolts. Here’s hoping that, after all the build-up, the new Avengers films work well. Personally I am looking forward to Young Avengers. We have seen a lot of the cast now, and anything with Kamala Khan in it is going to be good.

 

Viewing also includes museum exhibitions. This year the British Library put on Mediaeval Women. There was an amazing collection of original documents on show, including those pertaining to the 14^th Century English trans woman, Eleanor Rykener. Much of the exhibition did take a rather stereotypical view of what a woman is, and what her role in society should be, but the stand-out exhibit for me was the letter signed by Joan of Arc herself.

I also got to visit Copenhagen. The Danish National Museum is worth a look just for the Gundestrup Cauldron. It is an astonishing piece of metalwork.

The highlight of my music year has been Solas, a new double album from our local heroes here in Carmarthenshire. Adwaith is a female rock trio who have built up a stellar reputation in Wales. Their lyrics are all in Welsh, but the music can be enjoyed by anyone who loves a good guitar and drum band.

If you must have lyrics in English, you will be pleased that the new album from Gwenno has a lot of that – a marked departure from her previous song writing in Welsh and Cornish. Utopia is her poppiest album yet. Here’s hoping that it wins her some fans outside of the Celtic countries.

 

 Cheryl Morgan blogs, reviews and podcasts regularly at Cheryl’s Mewsings and Salon Futura. She is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press. She also lectures regularly on topics of SF&F literature, and on queer history.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 12: Tansy Rayner Roberts

 

Theatre and Other Pleasures in 2025

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

 

My year has been a difficult one, and so as always I have turned to the cozy and the funny to get me through when I have time to sink into a little pop culture.

Costume dramas remain my favorite escape. I’m enjoying the new adaptation of The Forsytes, not least because I’m so familiar with the text (and the two previous, plot-accurate TV adaptations from the 60s and early 2000s) that I’m finding the changes to the story-line in this version fascinating rather than infuriating.

On the other end of the media spectrum — my family and I just finished a rewatch of GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), with my 16-year old watching it for the first time, and my 20- year old having (apparently) learned about wrestling since the last time we saw it. It’s a fun, crunchy, complicated show filled with interesting women and indulgent '80s nostalgia. It’s been five years since COVID made Season 4 impossible to shoot, bringing the show to a sudden end, and it’s still upsetting that we didn’t get more.

Back to costume drama — I’ve been a Downton Abbey tragic for so long, it felt momentous to watch the final film in the cinema. I didn’t even rewatch to refresh my memory (ahem, my last rewatch was less than a year earlier), but I did give my husband a crash course so he could join me at the movies.

I loved it — indulgent fan service from end to end, and so many lovely hats. It is an epilogue, of course, not a real story — as is true of all three Downton films, given that the show had a properly satisfying end — so it’s basically a hat on a hat on a hat. But the in-jokes were fun.

What I did discover, in my craving to revisit the show, was my new favorite podcast. Up Yours, Downstairs is a husband and wife (I believe later episodes will be friendly ex-spouses, but I haven’t reached those yet) podcast that first began around Season 2 of Downton (2011 but also, 1914) and recorded its most recent episode this year for the finale.

As well as their passionate, loving, and anti-aristo American takes on the show — hilarious, chaotic, and sometimes devastating — the co-hosts focus on their mutual love of Edwardian history, researching key aspects of the show, and later broadening to reviews of other works including Mr Selfridge (which they love even more than Downton!), various Merchant Ivory films, Parade’s End, Anne of Green Gables, Gosford Park, and pretty much every Titanic film ever made.

Their research starts out at reading-off-Wikipedia levels and grows more complex, reviewing specific history texts and deep-diving into racial and LGBTQ+ perspectives. It’s a joyous romp, but you also get to witness history being absorbed.

Another sheer joy of this podcast is the community of “cousins” who send in telegrams and letters (Twitter & Email) to share their own love, lore, and specialized knowledge of Downton Abbey and Edwardian history.

This has been another wonderful year for cozy fantasy (how I adore and celebrate the rise of cozy fantasy!), with new releases from many of my faves. A.J. Lancaster released How To Find a Nameless Fae, a gentle romantasy retelling of Rumplestiltskin with a middle-aged princess, a grumpy nemesis, and a sentient house with pure Diana Wynne Jones vibes all the way down.

Speaking of middle-aged heroines, Rosalie Oaks brought her Matronly Misadventures series to a close with Lady Avely’s Guide To Guile and Peril, a cozy mystery set in a crumbling Cornish castle with illusion traps, espionage, tiny vampires, and a hot amnesiac Duke for our heroine to contend with… not to mention a reunion with one of her wayward adult children who has no idea she has been sleuthing and flirting her way across the country!

Tilly Wallace released the first two books in her new Regency botanical magic+tiny dragon cozy fantasy series, starting with The Stormborne Vine — a spinster heroine contends with a carnivorous creeping plant (and deep magical roots) at a country manor, in a story can only be described as Mansfield Park meets Rosemary & Thyme meets Little Shop of Horrors.

Closer to home, I wanted to share a few gems of local theatre with you. My little coastal city of Hobart, Tasmania has a thriving independent theatre scene with so many small companies and some powerhouse young people producing really interesting work. I’m a little biased because my son’s ongoing work in art design and stage management makes a lot of our theatre ticket-purchasing decisions for us… but I was raised on loving and appreciating live theatre, so it’s something I am delighted to share with my family now.

Some highlights from this year for me included Emma (Bijoux), which was a lovely production of the classic novel with a pitch-perfect cast and costumes that honestly kept me almost as riveted as the dialogue. (It didn’t hurt that I was in the second row and could enjoy all the bonnets up close)

I also loved a 48-Hour Shakespeare production of Macbeth (Bad Company), which had great, raw performances and also really stood out for its design choices, including a stage wrapped in Christo-style floaty plastic sheeting (illuminated gorgeously with lights and moving with the breeze) and literal interpretations of the blood on the hands of Lady Macbeth and her husband, smeared casually on their white clothing.

Speaking of fake blood, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the recent production of Evil Dead: The Musical (Big Job Productions) — in which “splash zone” seats were charged extra! This one was especially interactive for our family because our son Bailey was art-directing and prop-building: he made several puppets including a giant moose head, a dynamic chainsaw (that can be worn as a hand), multiple weapons, a wearable forest of trees, and two severed heads. 

In this case, he also needed to be a prop doctor, cleaning liters of fake blood off the props every night (and in the case of the chainsaw, fixing/rebuilding it). By the time we actually saw the show, we felt like we’d experienced it many times over — but OH it was wonderful. Tight, talented cast with amazing comedic, dramatic and musical talents… armed with squirty bottles for that extra random joy. I particularly admired how many people who bought those front row seats came wearing white for the full splash zone experience…

I started noting all of the shows I’ve seen this year because of Bailey, or because of Inigo (a borrowed son!), and the list got incredibly long! They worked together (B stage-managing, I directing) on Clue: On Stage (Big Job Productions), which used the tiny but wonderful Hidden Theatre stage rather brilliantly, considering that the show is designed for a much bigger space. Our boys worked well together to pull this off with a killer cast.

I also saw fantastic plays like Hedda Gabler, Folk, and Sunday Roast, which I might not have considered if Bailey wasn’t working on the production or Inigo wasn’t performing, because I knew nothing about them going in. A real stand-out for the year was The Master & Margarita (Bad Company & Old Nick), a hugely ambitious, gorgeously staged phantasmagoria using the quirky Peacock Theatre (with cliff-face back wall) to great effect, so intense and strange and beautiful.

When COVID hit and our world shrank around us, one of the first arts industries to be taken out was live theatre. Watching our local community figure out how to stage shows safely and come back stronger than ever over the last 5 years has been really inspiring. Having glimpsed a little of the behind the scenes work happening locally, I’m also impressed to see how indie theatre is growing, while prioritizing cast safety, intimacy co-ordination and accessibility alongside innovation and creativity.

My new attitude is very much “you regret the shows you don’t see more than the shows that you do.” That was what led me to take my 16-year old J to Melbourne for a show of their choice for their birthday (Beetlejuice, starring Eddie Perfect), which was an unforgettable shared experience. It was also what led me to hit an impulsive BUY on tickets when Adjoa Andoh came unexpectedly to Hobart.

Visiting friends in Tasmania, this wonderful actor (whom at the time I only knew as Martha’s Mum, Lady Danbury, and the voice of the Chateau show) decided to throw a one-night only fundraiser for our Hobart Repertory Theatre Society with the loose theme/premise of “celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare’s First Folio.” WELL. This was one of the most interesting, generous performances I have ever witnessed. Adjoa talked about her own long history as an actor, producer and director of Shakespeare, including an all-women-of-color staging of Richard II at the Globe Theatre and a recent opportunity to read from one of the original Folio manuscripts. In between her inspiring and funny and off-the-wall anecdotes, she regularly dropped into full, intensive character readings of her favourite scenes and characters from the Bard.

One woman, her career, her thoughts, her performances, one chair on stage, and she held us all mesmerized for two full performing sets.

Then, Adjoa gave the audience full permission to leave if they needed to go… and opened up for an unexpected THIRD set, this time a more casual Q&A about her career.

I came away buzzing and inspired and elated, and I’m pretty sure the other 300 or so people who got to sit in that theatre for that one-night-only experience felt the same way. Not to get all political as we teeter on the verge of the silly season, but… this is something AI can’t take from us. We’re seeing so many creative industries under attack from slop and copyright theft and most of all, a systematic and deeply mean-spirited devaluing of what we do as artists, as makers, as creators.

Live theatre may have been the first industry to topple under COVID, but there’s no replacing it with an algorithm.

While the enormous big city productions make for incredible experiences — I still dream about the set from Beetlejuice — you don’t have to spend Broadway bucks to see something really fun, or great. Community/independent theatre is an extraordinary gift to audiences, and there’s a reality to it — imperfections, messiness and beauty all squished in together—  that is undeniable.

The moment when a prop breaks but the scene goes on without missing a beat, or the comic timing between two actors just hits, or a performer manages to convince you he is being actively murdered by his own demonic hand… or the cast includes an in-joke one of their friends sitting in the front row… and you realise, this is the only time you or anyone else will EVER see this specific version exactly like this. It’s incredibly special.

If you’re lucky enough to have theatres, however large or small, within a reasonable travel distance of where you live, support your local shows! And when you find a company or a performer or a venue that creates work you enjoy… keep going back.

 

 Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Tasmanian fantasy & SFF novelist, critic, podcaster and -- thanks to her extensive commitment to buying all the theatre tickets -- a patron of the arts. Tansy's recent releases include These Valiant Stars, Crown Tourney, and Time of the Cat. You can also read her essays about masculinity in the Discworld novels at Speculative Insight. Find Tansy at patreon.com/tansyrr