We could do nothing but weird small press lesbian novellas on this podcast and I'd be happy. This one's about how we really need to blow up the sun but we're too busy having smoldering academic love triangles.

Lianyu Tan joins us for another foray into literature that started life as Xena AU fanfiction (or Xena Uber, in the parlance of the time.) This one starts out as a pirate romp featuring the world's brattiest sub/voluntary slave girl and ends up in some really dark places.

This is the most Wizards vs Lesbians book we've covered in ages, and it's also really good. It's a familiar setup - there's a thing in a pit in a little tiny town and the locals have to keep it fed. The beauty's in the execution.

We adventure into the realm of non-fiction - mostly - for the first time, courtesy of Isaac Fellman, who has joined us to discuss a book about two disasters. The first is the Andree Expedition, a real-life polar quest which failed both disastrously and predictably; the second is an exercise for the reader.

Finally, the all-caps title is correct! During the 2023 Wizzly awards we all said we were going to read Moby Dick by the time the next Wizzlies rolled around, and most of us did. It turns out it's really good. Like, I'd call it the great American novel, at least for the days before women were invented. Has anybody else heard about this?

We kick off a new series of author's choice episodes with Cameron Reed, who has brought us a novel you can chew on like the ragged edge of a thumbnail.

This book is about whether murdering antisemites is a good idea or not, morally and strategically, and as such it's about Israel without ever discussing Israel, which as a rhetorical gambit has its advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that it's therefore a New York Novel and it comes with all the problems that implies.

We persevere through technical issues to bring you this, our annual extravaganza of self-indulgence. Is it possible four years in that we're actually worse at this than when we started?

In fantasy Germany a fantasy Jewess and her fantasy Aryan forest princess must go up the river to save the cat, or something. Not as much blood as you'd expect in this one but there's plenty of soil.

We're dipping our toes into Dark Academia here. This book asks the question: what if your abusive academic advisor was literally a vampire? And the answer is it would be kinda cool. A classic example of horror elements blunting the actual horror, down to a 1960s setting that elides all the worst parts of the era.