Wizards Vs. Lesbians

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?

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.

This one takes a while to get going - at first it seems like a genderswapped swords & sorcery novel, but it turns out that's only one part of a much larger world. Recommended for Steerswoman fans.

A book about empire, memory, historical trauma and the consequences of dating your blorbo. Huge thanks to Vajra for suggesting this one and for coming on to talk about it!

Our esteemed pal P.H. Lee joins us for a rundown of this charming bit of YA. It's Brazilian! It's Really Brazilian!

We return to the schools that resemble the prisons for a book that predates the Ninth House but has a couple of startling similarities, including a proto-John Gaius Gen-X godhead.

On the occasion of our 100th mainline episode we treat ourselves by answering your questions.

In perhaps our most controversial take yet, we posit that this anime is good, actually. Your tolerance for breast collision physics will factor in whether you agree. 

Helpful alien friends take over the world and make everyone immortal and kind of chill, man. It's a metaphor for something or other. Maybe AI, maybe legal weed. Maybe california in general. It doesn't amount to much.

We have fandom historian and BL expert Naked Bee on to discuss this extremely charming bit of gay metafiction.

We return to Nicola Griffith to get a more measured take on the lesbian space colony genre, written if not in direct response to Daughters of a Coral Dawn then to books like it. (We know this because of a helpful author's note.)

We get to do a literary classic - significantly, an extremely funny literary classic - in the company of the excellent Kat Weaver. A joy.

Vintage lesbian separatist science fiction from 1984. It's almost charming until the implications set in - since women can't commit sexual assault and men can't not , pederasty for the one and extermination for the other only makes sense.