Another Book on the Shelf

Episode 159 is a book club episode. Gen and Jette talk about Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. The book chronicles her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their early days in New York City before they were the artists we know them as today. Show Notes This book. THIS BOOK! We just want to be artists doing all the things with our soulmate muses. We saw Patti Smith at Budweiser Stage last summer...

In Episode 158, we're talking about our official spooky season book pick: We Mostly Come Out at Night. This short story collection, edited by Rob Costello, features queer retellings and re-imaginings of classic monster stories and tropes. It was super fun and we had a great time reading it. Show Notes Rob Costello's book, The Dancing Bears: Queer Fables for the End Times, came out earlier this yea...

In Episode 157, we're celebrating our 6th anniversary of the podcast! It's been an amazing six and we can't wait for another six more. Show Notes A huge thank you to all of our regular listeners! We're just a little podcast and we appreciate each and every one of you. We're so glad you join us every episode to talk about books and writing. We're at more than 13,000 total listens, which may not sou...

In Episode 156, we've teamed up with one of our favourite indie publishers, House of Anansi Press, to read the short story collection Who Will Bury You? Written by Zimbabwean author Chido Muchemwa, the stories take place across generations, in Toronto and Zimbabwe, and grapple with loss, family, and the meaning of home. Show Notes We love working with House of Anansi! This is our seventh episo...

Episode 155 is a book club episode, and we're talking about Gen's summer pick, Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. It offers up some spooky southern gothic vibes with a side of car races and a family curse. Show Notes After picking this book, Gen realized it was blurbed by the author of her last book club pick, Starling House by Alix E. Harrow. As Jette aptly pointed out, this is the most Gen book...

In Episode 154, it's time for another instalment of #BookstagramMadeMeDoIt with I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones. We just can't stay away from the spooky books this summer, but this one has a distinctly summer vibe with it's unique twist on the slasher genre. You'll want to read it with a bowl of popcorn handy! Show Notes If you like your horror with a dose of meta,...

In Episode 153, Gen and Jette talk about Reality Squall by J. Krawczyk. Space-time gets funky in this one, so you know we loved it! Show Notes One of Jason's other books, It Look Like Dad, was published by Little Ghosts Books , one of our favourite Toronto bookstores that is also a publisher! Jason Krawczyk is not just a writer of books, but a filmmaker too. His production company is called Al...

The sun is out, the weather is sweaty, which means it's time for our summer hangout episode. We're talking about what we've been reading over the last couple months and checking in on our reading goals now that we're halfway through the year. Show Notes The Aberfoyle Antique Market runs until late October if you want to check it out. Write or Die has some amazing writing workshops....

In Episode 151, we're doing another instalment of Page to Screen with Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey and the mini series of the same name. It's a true crime story based on the 1997 murder of Reena Virk in Victoria, BC. Show Notes This is our second true crime story, the first being way back in Episode 8 with Killers of the Flower Moon. In a strange coincidence, that film adaptation st...

It's our 150th episode! Very fittingly, it's a book club episode, which is the entire reason this podcast exists. In this episode, we're talking about Jette's pick, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and we loved reading more of Moreno-Garcia's work. Show Notes We can't believe we've recorded 150 episodes of book content! Of those episodes, 38 have b...

In Episode 149, Gen and Jette continue to celebrate Pride Month with Tony Kushner's award-winning play, Angels in America. We had to cut ourselves off eventually because we could talk about this play forever. Show Notes We went to see this play last December at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto. It was produced by That Theatre Company and directed by Craig Pike. (Yes, Torontonians, Craig...

In Episode 148, Gen and Jette are kicking off Pride Month with Maia Kobabe's graphic novel memoir, Gender Queer. Show Notes This graphic novel memoir was such a great entry point for talking about gender and sexuality. Maia Kobabe uses Spivak pronouns, e/em/eir. You can check out Kobabe's other work in a number of anthologies, including Gothic Tales of Haunted Love and Be Gay, Do Comics ....

It's spring, which means it's time for another hangout episode. We love having these chats about all the non-podcast books we've been reading and the writing projects we're working on. Show Notes We actually hung out IRL recently. It was so much fun to walk around TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) and then chat for hours at Cafe Landwer afterwards. While at TCAF, we got to chat wi...

In Episode 146, Gen and Jette talk about their most recent book club pick—Starling House by Alix E. Harrow. We are so here for the spooky houses and gothic vibes! Show Notes Eleanor Starling was giving Mark Ryden and Margaret Keane vibes. Starling House is a portal fantasy of sorts, as is Harrow's debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. She also wrote a short story called "A Witch...

In Episode 145, we're back with the sequel to Her Majesty's Royal Coven! This is probably the fastest we've ever read the second book in a series, but we simply couldn't wait. So much happened in this book. Can we have the next one already please? Show Notes Juno Dawson is absolutely killing us with these cliffhangers. Yes, another one. Always with that last sentence! The next book...

In Episode 144, Gen and Jette read the first volume of Night Eaters, a horror graphic novel by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. You know we're all about the creepy graphic novels, but this one had the added bonus of being very funny. Safe to say we loved it! Show Notes Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have worked in all corners of the comic/graphic novel world, including Marvel and their co-created s...

In Episode 143, Gen and Jette talk about everything they've been up to so far this year, including what books they've been reading and what they've been writing. Show Notes We may end up squeezing in an episode on The Shadow Cabinet as a follow up to Her Majesty's Royal Coven. Word to the wise if you decide to work through The Artist's Way — buy a smaller notebook. In our next...

In Episode 142, Gen and Jette discuss their latest book club selection, Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson. Obviously we loved the witchy vibes and the stellar queer rep, but also the end of this book had us screaming. Yes, it ends on a cliffhanger! Show Notes We haven't done a book quite like this one before! Obviously we've done witchy books in the past, but not one that was so...

In Episode 141, it's time for another James Baldwin book! If you've been around for a while, you'll know that James Baldwin is one of our favourite authors, so we've turned it into an annual tradition to read one of his works every February. This time we're reading Baldwin's non-fiction with his first essay collection, Notes of a Native Son. As usual, we had an incredible t...

In Episode 140, Gen and Jette get to revisit one of their favourite books, Paper Houses, with the sequel, Pale Shadows. Dominique Fortier's follow-up to her reimagining of Emily Dickinson's life, traces the publication of Dickinson's poems after her death and the women who helped it happen. Obviously we loved this. It's time to add every Emily Dickinson collection to our reading li...

In Episode 139, Gen and Jette continue their #BookstagramMadeMeDoIt series with The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz. It's our first whodunnit style mystery, and we had a great time. Show Notes While we've definitely seen this book floating around Instagram (hence why we picked it), we've also seen a lot of others by Anthony Horowitz. Probably because he's written...to say a lo...

In Episode 138, Gen and Jette discuss the graphic novel Flung Out of Space by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer. It reimagines the life of author Patricia Highsmith and the inspiration for her classic lesbian novel The Price of Salt. Show Notes We've begun a bit of a tradition of reading a graphic novel as our second episode of the year, and we're loving it. It's especially fun to talk ab...

It's our first episode of 2024, and as usual we're kicking it off with last year's final book club book. In episode 137, we're talking about The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. It's a fantastically strange and creepy collection of short stories, so of course we loved it. Show Notes Neither of us knows enough about Argentinian history, so some of the sociopolitica...

It's the end of the year, so it's time for our annual wrap-up episode! Join us as we chat about what we've been up to the last few months, how we did with our reading and writing goals this year, and what we have coming in the new year. We've got a few teasers in there to look out for! Show Notes Obviously one of our most hotly anticipated 2024 episodes is the sequel to Paper House...

In Episode 135, it's time for our annual FUJK book selection. Once upon a time, before a certain author who wrote a book about a certain boy wizard revealed herself to be a piece of trash, we had begun working out way through the series. Now we choose a queer trans author to read instead! This year we're reading Pluralities by Avi Silver. We absolutely loved it! Prepare for some obsessed r...