A Meal of Thorns – Details, episodes & analysis

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Marita Arvaniti
• Title: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• A Meal of Thorns and the Ancillary Review of Books are Hugo finalists! We are delighted and honored; a big congratulations to all the finalists.
• Dianna Wynne Jones, Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Bear
• Dianna Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock
• Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love
• Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin
• Terri Windling & Ellen Datlow edited fairytale collections
• Robin Hobb’s Mad Ship
• Patrick O'Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books
• Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots
• Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption
• E.R. Eddison
• Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series
• Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale
• Euripedes' The Bacchae
• Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
• Michael Swanwick’s Hope in the Mist
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings
• C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically Prince Caspian
• Robert Luketic’s Legally Blonde
• Edgar Allen Poe, Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore
• Anne Carson’s translation of Bakkhai
• Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
• Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
• N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
• Sofia Samatar's Olondrian novels
• Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes
• Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous and Memoirs of a Spacewoman
• T.H. White, Tanith Lee
• Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer
• Jo Walton’s Among Others
• Kat Howard’s Roses and Rot
• Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon
• Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife
• Guardian Article on romantasy
• Copyright romantasy case
• Sarah J. Maas
• Jacqueline Carey Kushiel's Dart
• Nicholas Stuart Gray’s Seven Swans
• Marita’s Instagram

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Archita Mittra
• Title: Among Others by Jo Walton
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk & Archita’s review
• Sue Lynn Tan's Immortal
• Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Interstellar Megachef & The Ten Percent Thief
• Michael Nieva's Dengue Boy
• Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide
• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven
• Ernest Cline's Ready Player One
• Stranger Things
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
• Jame Tiptree, Jr.
• Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17
• List of books mentioned in Among Others
• Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles
• C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia
• Le Guin’s “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” from The Language of the Night
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle
• Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Delany’s Trouble on Triton
• Walton’s Informal History of the Hugos
• C.J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel
• Archita's reviews @ Strange Horizons & Locus
• Archita on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram
• Archita's Locus year-end
• Casella’s Locus year-end
• Jared Pechaček's The West Passage, Casella's review, and of course Jared's A Meal of Thorns episode on E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistress

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Garrett Bridger Gilmore
• Title: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• “The Horror At Redhook” by H.P. Lovecraft
• Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
• The Night Ocean by Paul LaFarge
• Lone Women by Victor LaValle
• The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft
• “The Lovecraft Boomlet” of adaptions/retellings/reworkings
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
• Get Out directed by Jordan Peele
• Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther run, Between the World and Me, The Water Dancer
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• The World Fantasy Award
• Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• Slapboxing with Jesus by Victor LaValle
• James by Percival Everett
• Aida Levy-Hussen’s How to Read African American Literature- reparative & prohibitive readings
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout
• “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• HPL’s At the Mountains of Madness
• "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" by The Mountain Goats, from Heretic Pride
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors
• R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or The Necessity of Violence
• Garrett's twitter
• Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Shinjini Dey
• Title: Tainaron: Mail From Another City by Leena Krohn, translated by Hildi Hawkins
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx 
• The “Post-Exotic” novels by Antoine Volodine etc- Kree, Mevlido’s Dreams, Postexoticism in 12 Lessons
• The New Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
• On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland
• Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer
• Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
• Renee Gladman’s Houses of Ravicka
• "Big Dumb Objects"
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach
• Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander & Casella’s review
• "The Look", "The Gaze"
• Entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre & mystic Angelus Silesius
• Emmanuel Levinas & Martin Buber
• Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger In Olondria
• Nghi Vo’s The City in Glass & Casella’s review
• Protagoras
• “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose”
• Longhorn beetles
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation”
• Shinjini’s website & twitter
• How did I fail to mention TMBG's "Snail Shell"?

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Sunny Moraine
• Title: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Your Shadow Half Remains
• Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History
• Looming Low
• Singing With All My Skin and Bone
• Serial horror podcast Gone
• The Shadow Files of Morgan Knox
• Gibson's Neuromancer, Virtual Light, Mona Lisa Overdrive, “The Gernsback Continuum”, The Peripheral, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”
• Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dune Messiah
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
• Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider, The Strange, and North American Lake Monsters
• China Miéville’s The City and the City
• Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia
• Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation
• William Gibson & the Futures of Contemporary Culture edited by Mitch R. Murray and Matthias Nilges
• Sheryl Vint & Charles Yu
• Beat writers; Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs
• Imagism 
• Mono No Aware
• Speculative Realism/Object Oriented Ontology; Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton
• C.J. Cherryh's notion of “Third Person Intense Internal”
• Aimee Pokwatka’s Self Portrait With Nothing
• Kids by The Midnight
• Sonic Nurse by Sonic Youth
• Amplitudes edited by Lee Mandelo
• Sunny on Bluesky
• World Fantasy Awards

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Juan Martinez
• Title: Gilded Needles by Michael McDowell
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Juan’s collection Best Worst American & horror novel Extended Stay
• Jackleg Press
• StoryStudio
• Tananarive Due's The Reformatory
• Eden Robins’ Remember You Will Die
• Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Told the Devil
• Jesse Ball's The Repeat Room
• T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies
• Peter Straub
• Beetlejuice, directed by Timothy Burton
• Tales from the Crypt & Tales from the Darkside
• The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick
• McDowell's The Elementals
• "A little bit like Edith Wharton with more murder"
• Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg
• Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
• Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame & Les Misérables
• Triangle of Sadness, directed by Ruben Östlund
• Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo
• The Abominable Dr. Phibes, directed by Robert Fuest
• They Might Be Giants
• Lydia Lunch
• Robert Mapplethorpe
• Patti Smith
• Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus & Julie Taymor’s film adaptation
• Thomas Ligotti, Bruno Schulz, & Franz Kafka
• McDowell's Death Collection
• Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, & C.J. Cherryh
• Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird
• The Ghosts of Where We Are From
• Juan’s DNC protest coverage at the Believer, parts one & two
• Follow Juan on Instagram & Threads for the good doodle content

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Amal El-Mohtar
• Title: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
• In Universes by Emmet North
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
• Amal’s review of those three novels
• The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
• The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone
• Star Wars
• Wicked problems
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
• The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang
• The Battle of Algiers directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
• Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars series Andor
• The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
• The sequels to Traitor Baru, The Monster Baru Cormorant & The Tyrant Baru Cormorant
• Commedia dell’arte
• Lee Mandelo's writing on Eve Sedwgick, paranoid & reparative reading
• Kameron Hurley & Arkady Martine
• Exordia by Seth Dickinson
• The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies
• Amal's next book, The River Has Roots
• The ballad of The Two Sisters/The Bonny Swans
• Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Guest: Dan Hartland
• Title: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• This blog has a round-up of articles and commentary on the Gaiman allegations.
• Dan’s Snap! Criticism series at Ancillary
• Handheld Press
• Vonda McInty’re The Exile Waiting & Dreamsnake
• The 2024 Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Annie Luong on Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last
• Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle
• Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise & Casella’s review
• Don DeLillo’s White Noise
• Winterson’s Written on the Body, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, and Frankisstein
• Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels
• William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale
• China Miéville’s The City & The City (though I don’t think we actually name it)
• Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis
• Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
• The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction edited by Emily Horton, Philip Tew, and Leigh Wilson
• Neil Gaiman, Jeff Noon, Steph Swainston
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
• Frank Herbert’s Dune
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Wendy Roy on Cherie Dimaline
• William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and others
• Dan’s piece in LARB on Christopher Priest and his last novel, Airside

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: A.V. Marraccini
• Title: The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor
• Anton Hur’s Toward Eternity and Casella’s review
• A.V.’s forthcoming book, These New Fragilities
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars
• Presses discussed:
• Lolli Editions
• New Directions
• FSG Press
• Fitzarraldo
• Seven Stories
• Tor
• Inside the Castle
• Kristina Carlson’s Eunuch translated from the Finnish by Mikko Alapuro
• Psychedlic Ray Bradbury covers
• Jenny Hval’s novels, such as Paradise Rot
• Samuel R. Delany
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors
• Gretchen Felker-Martin Manhunt and Cuckoo
• John Trefry
• Olga Ravn's My Work
• Lea Guldditte Hestelund's sculpture
• Interview with Ravn about Hestelund 
• Le Guin's Carrier Bag theory of fiction
• Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick’s 2001
• Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco
• Angélica Gorodischer
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future
• Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner
• Battlestar Galactica
• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness
• Jorge Luis Borges & Italo Calvino
• E. Catherine Tobler's The Necessity of Stars
• Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
• Ravn's Twitter @OlgaRavn
• AV on Twitter @saintsoftness

Taylor Driggers joins us to talk about the second volume in C.S. Lewis's SPACE TRILOGY. A richly-described and philosophical science fiction story, PERELANDRA has a lot that's interesting and a lot that's pretty weird when you think about it.

A Meal of Thorns is a podcast from the Ancillary Review of Books.

Credits:

• Guest: Taylor Driggers
• Title: Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology by Taylor Driggers
• The Ursula Le Guin Archives
• Laurie Marks’ Elemental Logic novel series
• Philophantast conference
• The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow
• Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman (and our episode on it)
• The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman
• The other two novels in the Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength
• Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Inklings (wiki link)
• Lewis’s A Grief Observed
• Lewis’s final novel Till We Have Faces
• Ursula Le Guin’s review of Lewis’s The Dark Tower
• Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Pilgrim’s Regress, and The Screwtape Letters
• Stephen Metcalf, “Language and Self-Consciousness: The Making and Breaking of C.S. Lewis’ Personae” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis: Language and Narrative in Theory and Practice ed. Peter J. Schakel & Charles A. Huttar
• Lewis’s debate with Elizabeth Anscombe
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
• Ridley Scott’s Alien
• “Sehnsucht”, the concept of inconsolable longing
• The Transformers franchise
• Aamer Rahman on defeating Nazis
• Satan (Milton’s version)
• Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and specifically the religion/philosophy of the Handdara
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain
• Casella’s essay on (not) defending science fiction against criticisms of complicity
• Taylor’s seminar for his work with the Le Guin Fellowship on historicizing queerness in fantasy and “queer hiddenness in the archive”, available online this fall/winter.
• Greg Egan’s “Oracle”, available on his site (and in the collections Oceanic and The Best of Greg Egan)

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