A Meal of Thorns

Only in its 5th year of operation, the Le Guin Fiction prize has already become something of a critical darling, with very interesting shortlists and winners that rarely overlap with other genre awards. Critic and reviewer Roseanna Pendlebury returns to the podcast to share opinions and insights on the nine books on this year’s list.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury

Titles: The Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize Shortlist, 2026

Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press)

Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)

Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock)

Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin)

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books)

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books)

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books)

One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)

Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit)

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel

Eastercon

Toshiyuki Kusakihara’s Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

LA Worldcon

Hugo Awards

Clarke Awards

Otherwise Awards

Olga Ravn's The Employees (AMOT episode)

Stanislaw Lem

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

Iain M. Banks

…as opposed to Banksy

Niall Harrison

Ann Leckie

Paradox’s Stellaris

Becky Chambers

Martha Wells' Murderbot series

“squeecore”, originally proposed on the Rite Gud podcast; elaborated a bit in Simon McNeil’s “Notes on Squeecore” 

Elizabeth Sandifer’s idea of "torwave"

T. Kingfisher's Astarion (and bizarre discourse thereon)

Phobos

Sarah Palin

Arturo Serrano

Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater

Oliver Langmead

AMOT’s First Episode with Dan Hartland

China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy

Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft

K.J. Bishops’s The Etched City

Rebecca Roanhorse

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (AMOT episode)

Elwin Cotman’s work, eg Weird Black Girls

Le Guin’s Changing Planes

In Your Spare Time, a podcast where various people read entries from Le Guin’s blog

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass

Sarah Mueller's The Bone Orchards

Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers

Le Guin’s Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness & The Word for World Is Forest

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Gene Wolfe & Harlan Ellison

Colson Whitehead & Marlon James

Le Guin (and Virginia Woolf), “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”

Frodo & Sam from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

Roseanna & Casella’s AMOT discussion of Fellman’s Dead Collections

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The Mulai by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches

Fitzcarraldo office shoot

Nerds of a Feather

Small Press Dispatch series at ARB

Roseanna's blog & bluesky

Roseanna & Dan Hartland discussing the Clarke shortlist at NoAF

Out of print for the greater part of the 20th century, Hopkins’ Of One Blood looks a lot like Afro-futurism, using ancient Ethiopian technology and the new science of mesmerism to think about racial politics. But it’s actually a bit stranger than that—Garret Bridger Gilmore returns to walk us through some of the novel’s contexts and theories.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Garret Bridger Gilmore

Title: Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self by Pauline E. Hopkins

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré 

The Fog by James Herbert

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D. G. Compton

J.G. Ballard

Japan Sinks by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Michael Gallagher

Plessy V. Ferguson

Mesmerism, Vitalism, Magnetism

H.G. Wells

William James

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Martin Delany

Black Panther

Hazel V. Carby's edited collection of Hopkins' Work

Deborah E. McDowell

MIT Radium Age series

Minister Faust

George S. Schuyler's Black Empire

Marcus Garvey

H. Rider Haggard's She

Geoffrey Sanborn's "The Pleasure of Its Company: Of One Blood and the Potentials of Plagiarism"

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Our Stand On Zanzibar Episode

W.E.B. DuBois & double consciousness

Mississippi Quarterly article on race in the Southern Reach trilogy

Cora Jean Moten’s “The Creeping Thing”

Worldcon episode time: we’ve got interviews, we’ve got a coffee report, we’ve got an only-mildly chaotic group podcast attempt!

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guests & Collaborators:

Thomas Ha

Alex Kingsley

Frauke Uhlenbruch

Marshall Ryan Maresca & Cass Morris of Worldbuilding for Masochists

Kevin Anderson & Lori Anderson of Hugo, Girl!

John Coxon of Octothorpe

Helen Montgomery

Sam Kim of Kumquat

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Additional sounds & music:

The Los Angeles Metro

“Surf Shimmy” by Kevin Macleod

“Through the Woods We Ran” by Vindsvept

And the cool theremin sounds Kevin made for Hugo, Girl!

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons

The Best of Jeffrey Ford and Pandemonium Waltz

Steve Rasnic Tem & Brian Evenson

Michel Siffre, French cave-and-sleep explorer

J.S. Fields

Zoe Franznick

DePaul Pop Culture Conference

Sabrina Mittermeier: The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting For The Future

Alien vs. Predator, Hellraiser, Dogma

The Bible in Motion, edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch

Memory Alpha

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park

Chuck, Earth: Final Conflict, Scavengers Reign, Battleship

The Speculative Literature Foundation and their Deep Dish reading series

HWA (Horror Writers Association)

Playground Chicago

Strong Branch

SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association)

Goblin Market

Mary Robinette Kowal, Curtis Chen

Alexy on Bluesky & Instagram

Space Wizard publishing

Loquat coffee

Artist Devon Sinead

Arboretum and Botanical Garden at Cal State Fullerton

E.G. Condé

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Uketsu’s Strange Houses, Strange Pictures,Strange Buildings, translated by Jim Rion

Jo Walton

Lightspeed and Reactor

Alasdair Stuart & Marguerite Kenner (of projects like The Full Lid and Escape Artists)

Liza Groen Trombi of Locus Magazine

Cube

Gene Wolfe

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

Green Marsby Kim Stanley Robinson

Widow’s Bay

Fonda Lee, Shannon Chakraborty, Gabriella Buba

SFF Addicts

Robert Shearman’s Tiny Deaths, Ian Mond’s pick for a recent episode

Nerds of a Feather

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

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