essays
including short reviews of academic books, originally posted on Goodreads, as well as fiction reviews published elsewhere.
in English
- Beginning Where One Is: Review of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong[’]o’s Decolonizing Language
- this review was published in the Ancillary Review of Books in 2025.
- The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson (review): short critical review of a fantasy novel, looking in particular at its handling of Celtic material.
- this review was published by CARANTES in 2025.
- The Celts Meet Celtic Fantasy: an analysis of the influence of Celtic-language cultures — or ideas about Celtic-language cultures — on the fantasy genre since James Macpherson’s Ossian.
- this essay was published in Strange Horizons in 2025.
- Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson (1981) (review)
- Gay YA: A personal retrospective: a short personal essay looking back on five(-ish) years of reading LGBTQ+ young adult fiction.
- this essay was originally posted in 2015 at the now-defunct YA Pride.
- The (im)possibilities of Openly Straight: a short personal essay reflecting on the book Openly Straight, by Bill Konigsberg (2013).
- this essay was originally posted in 2015 at the now-defunct YA Pride.
- In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker (2011) (review)
- Misplaced in Translation: this column is a series of longer-form reviews of SFF in English translation that, for one reason or another, seems to have missed its audience. published in the Ancillary Review of Books.
- #1 (Oct. 2025): Elia Barceló (tr. Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell), Natural Consequences
- #2 (Jan. 2026): Djuna (tr. Anton Hur), Counterweight
- #3 (Mar. 2026): Sergey Dyachenko and Marina Dyachenko (tr. Elinor Huntington), The Scar
- My (mostly) definitive Octavia E. Butler novel ranking: having, as of July 2024, finally read all of Octavia E. Butler’s novels, here is my ranking of them, along with some general reflections on Butler’s work.
- Parts of the Present: Review of Owain Owain’s Y Dydd Olaf (The Last Day): short critical review of a Welsh-language science-fiction novel newly published in English translation.
- Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn (2008) (review)
- Theory for Celtic studies: Introduction: I posted this essay in June 2020 with the intention of beginning a series of posts on the value and use of “theory” in and for Celtic studies (in the broadest sense); I had also planned to accompany it with suggested introductory reading lists for different bodies of theory. neither of these ambitions has (yet) panned out, but I think the essay stands all right on its own.
- Voices of Fire: Reweaving the Literary Lei of Pele and Hiʻiaka, kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui (2014) (review)
- You’ve Been Propagandized: Review of Marietta S. Shaginyan’s Yankees in Petrograd: short critical review of a Soviet science fiction adventure novel from 1924, newly (re)translated into English by Jill Roese.
- this review was published in the Ancillary Review of Books in 2025.
in Spanish / en castellano
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