Wizards Vs. Lesbians

This one's about a guy who gets stuck in a labyrinth. Lee joins us to discuss why the guy is there and what, if anything, it all means. We all agree it's a very good book but past that point things get a little contentious.

A synaesthete vagabond who wants to live like the Bright Young People accidentally goes to grad school instead. It's like if Foucault's Pendulum was funny.

What if the dude who is possessing you is actually a nice guy? And what if you're the kind of gremlin who can only be fixed by a live-in boyfriend, and by "live-in" I mean in your actual brain?

Masha du Toit joins us to discuss a book about going to college and writing fanficiton which turns out to be laser-targeted at one of our hosts. So what we end up with is a strange mixture of cultural history and personal pain, much like the book itself.

It's this again! In this episode we discuss the following stories:

The V*mpire by P.H. Lee Katya Vasilevna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy The Witch Trap by Jennifer Hudak Joanna's Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou

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?