If I'm trying to post these review/recommendation posts at the solstices and equinoxes, then I'm a few days late - I've gotten pleasantly sloppy with my scheduling now that classes are no longer in session - but I did not forget! The period of April, May, June was busy with both difficult and excellent things, and many stories (in many forms) left an impression on me. Here are a few.

Flights of Fancy

Louise Glück, "Faithful and Virtuous Night" (poetry collection, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)

I think Louise Glück is one of the best poets ever and this collection can be submitted as further evidence. I briefly considered putting it in the "Ones That Haunt Me" category - not because there is anything actually disturbing in here but simply because of the very slow, reflective reading that the poems demand of the reader, which feels like a kind of haunting. Slowness, here, should not be confused with difficulty. There is a surface clarity and a luminousness to the poems with something much deeper and more unsettled underneath, and sometimes I had to read just one poem and sit with it for a while, trying to feel rather than think my way through a meaning.

Marie Brennan, "The Final Voyage of the Ouranos" (short story, The Sunday Morning Transport, January 25, 2026)

This is just so yummy and delicious! The world is built in a way that implies more than it shows, but I sank right in to the science fantasy and the neologisms and the luxury and the ability to make and unmake anything - it made me want to see more and to play around in a world like this myself. Then of course, things go wrong, and in a delightfully eerie fashion.

Ursula Whitcher, "Secondary Filters" (poem, Strange Horizons, February 23, 2026)

Have I mentioned I am bad at reviewing poems? I'm bad at reviewing them. Yeah. This is very short and very 2026. I love the contrast in it - the simplistic knowledge embedded in a computer versus the fraught, contextual, grounded knowledge of the human in the loop, both of them looking at what is, ostensibly, the same image.

Emily Tesh, "The Incandescent" (novel, Tor, 2025)

Okay, so I was excited for this, partly because I loved the twists and turns of Some Desperate Glory, but also because I've been on a kick about the type of dark academia that actually critiques academia, particularly if it's written from a faculty point of view, as opposed to just some students who uncover a murder or something. The Incandescent did not disappoint. It's billed as a sort of anti-Harry-Potter, being about a teacher at a British magic school - and there are certainly a few places where you can see Tesh getting a few little digs in at Rowling. But on the whole, The Incandescent is refreshingly its own thing. I'm not even sure how to say all of what I loved about it without spoilers, but I love this book's protagonist, who is messy and flawed and also terrifyingly competent and good at what she does - deeply human in both the good and less-good senses of that word. And I love Tesh's take on the nature of demons, which are pointedly disconnected here from any religious connotations while still being very inhuman and very dangerous creatures which anyone in the proximity of magic will need to be wary of. I love the way that they start out formless but hungry to take on a "self" - and how that relates not only to their tendency to possess people/things, but also to the human characters' own relationships with identity and meaning, and the way that the protagonist herself has been clinging a little too hard to a certain idea of who she is and what her life is for.

As a fun side note, I brought this book along with me to read while I was getting a tattoo, having no idea that a magical tattoo actually plays an important role in the plot. So that was a fun bit of synchronicity. My tattoo IRL doesn't have a demon in it! Probably.

Disco Elysium (video game, Zaum, 2019)

Okay. This will be a longer review because I have so much to say. People have been raving about how good Disco Elysium is since 2019, but I'm late to the party as always. I finally tried it and love it so much for so many reasons, OMG.

Anyone who has read any of my books will know that I am a huge fan of interiority. If my editor doesn't stop me then I will just keep going on for pages about what a character is thinking or feeling. So, guess what Disco Elysium is? It's an interiority RPG.

If you've heard one thing about this game, it's probably the distinctive writing style where different voices in the protagonist's head are commenting on what's going on. The first few times I saw examples, it sounded like a weird gimmick and not necessarily my thing - but I was astonished how well it worked for me once I experienced it in its proper context. In Disco Elysium you have a unique window on what Harry Du Bois is going through (it's a lot, he's a mess) and what's occurring to him at every moment - and it's your job to navigate between all these conflicting ideas and impulses and decide what he'll actually do. I love this very much. There is also refreshingly little combat; instead, you solve problems using various skills. I feel like "I love games with lots of interiority and no combat*" is a pretentious thing to say - like, it's what someone would say if they felt that they were The Most Intellectual Gamer and superior to all those other gamers - but also legitimately I love this shit. I want 100 more interiority RPGs now.

(*There is technically one very important combat, late in the game. Plus a few minor, optional, non-lethal ones that you can get into if you are really determined. But it's all just handled with narrative, dialogue trees, and skill checks like everything else - there’s no separate “combat system.”)

Plot-wise, you're solving not only a sordid murder but also an entire sociopolitical tinderbox which happens to have a murder at its heart. People seethe with hidden motives, alliances, and grudges that you can only untangle one effortful layer at a time. (They also seethe with racism and misogyny, which is an aspect of the game that won't be to everyone's taste, but it's clearly the type of writing where the writers aren't endorsing those things but are instead very intentionally dropping you into the middle of them, in all their unvarnished and realistic ugliness, so you can decide how to respond.) The setting is a fictional city which appears at first glance to be from a gritty, run-down alternate twentieth century, but as you explore, it also gets delightfully weirder. Not all of the weirdness is real - the other thing that these characters visibly seethe with is superstition and pseudoscience - but some of the weirdness, transcendently, is.

Also - it's awkward to talk about this, but talking about neurodiversity is my brand, so I'm going to be awkward and say it: Harry Du Bois's interiority is an extremely neurodivergent interiority. It's easy for "lol crazy character with voices in his head" to go very far wrong, which is frankly one of the reasons why I didn't play this game earlier - and I have no idea what the writers' perspective was as they came up with all this, whether they understood they were doing serious heavy-duty neurodivergent rep, or whether they mostly saw it as a bit they were doing. And I can't speak for all neurodivergent people. But personally, I feel that if you took a very honest and accurate picture of what a certain type of OSDD looks like - and then filtered it through the same filter of cynicism that colors everything else in the game, while also hooking it into your RPG skill mechanic - then this is what you would get. It rings true to me in that way, you know? It checks out.

Anyway, I not only spent a couple of weeks autistically hyperfixated on this game, but I ended up hunting through the Wikipedia for a list of "spiritual successors" and adding them with big hopeful eyes to my Steam wishlist, while daydreaming about ways I could maybe one day write an interiority RPG myself. (I played all the way through Esoteric Ebb (Raw Fury, 2026), which is cute and engaging but didn't slay me with its brilliance in the same way as Disco; I also bought a copy of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (Zaum, 2026), but haven't had the chance to really dive in yet.) Someone should have just printed a big label on Disco Elysium saying "THIS IS ADA HOFFMANN'S JAM." It would have saved me a lot of time.

Comfort Reads

John Wiswell, "The Great Beyond Commands" (flash fiction; first published in Unidentified Funny Objects 9, 2022; but I read in Issue 10 of Small Wonders, April 2024.)

This is hilarious and adorable, and doesn't overstay its welcome. A cranky magician is annoyed by a snooping vigilante, and tries to mind-control magic him into leaving him alone - but he is also perplexed to realize that he finds the vigilante attractive. From there, the story goes exactly where you imagine it will go, in the most cutely, grumpily sincere way it can. (If you see a consent issue inherent in the premise, don't worry - that's addressed, and deftly undone, before anybody gets hurt.)

The Ones That Haunt Me

qntm, "Valuable Humans in Transit" (short story collection, self-published, 2022)

Ok, so (spec fic hipster voice) I knew about qntm before he was cool. I happened on to his short stories on his website a few years ago, loved them, realized there was a collection, and immediately put the collection on my wish list. Due to the nature of my wish list which always has 10357 things, that meant I didn't actually read the whole collection until just now. Qntm's whole schtick is tech horror, the kind that you'd find in the better parts of the SCP Wiki, which he has contributed to. He's got a very detached, matter-of-fact, cerebral voice which works really well for what he's doing, because the words go down easy but then you've got an entire cosmic horror in your brain - usually the kind that stems from humans' own technological & corporate overreach - which gets more skin-crawling the longer you think about it. A couple of the works in the collection read differently now, post-genAI, but that's neither an entirely bad thing nor, really, the point. Of course qntm is better known nowadays for There Is No Antimimetics Division; I hear it's good. I'm going to check that one out, too, eventually.

Sam J. Miller, "Boys, Beasts & Men" (short story collection, Tachyon Publications, 2022)

Boys, Beasts & Men is an absolute unit. I have always found Miller's short stories moving and well-crafted, but put together in this way - with a lightly sketched framing story that ties them together - they mutually reinforce into something greater than the sum of its parts. I read it while I was in Toronto for my book launch and I couldn't put it down. And this is maybe a very personal, idiosyncratic reaction, but what tips it over into the "Haunt Me" category is this pervasive sense I have that Miller knows something, with regards to the role of queer identity in an oppressive world, that I don't and perhaps never will. Miller is consistently queer-as-in-fuck-you, very concerned with the humanity and the justified rage of the most vulnerable humans, in a way that puts my own milquetoast middle-class queer advocacy to shame. Miller is boots on the ground; he is the real deal. Go read this.

Sofia Samatar, "The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain" (novella, Tordotcom, 2024)

Speaking of putting me to shame? ASDFASGJLK;. This is exquisitely done. It was another stop on the "dark academia that actually critiques academia" tour, and that element is certainly there, but it reads even more as a story about something older, darker, realer and worse than the university, which the university is perpetually unwilling and unable to address. The writing itself, on a sentence level, is as luminous as the classic LeGuin that it's been justifiably compared to.

Seth Wade, "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues" (poem, Strange Horizons, January 26, 2026)

What gets me about this one is the sense of shame. We like to imagine there are forces looking out for us in the world, but what if you were too much of a fuckup even for them? It's brainweasel logic, but it's drawn very well and true to life. The irony of the final lines is breathtaking.

Sarah Pauling, "Remember Me in the Meat" (Clarkesworld, February 2026)

As a cognitive scientist and AI literacy educator, I think more people should write about cognitive offloading. Which, as this story demonstrates, is not necessarily the same as writing about generative AI. In Pauling's future, everyone has uploaded their episodic memories to the cloud, with all the security issues this implies - to such an extent that the intentional use of one's own brain for memory is considered intimate and obscene. But on the level of physical response, memories - especially trauma memories - still accrue no matter what anyone does. Pauling's protagonist is a traumatized assassin who's determined to use all these facts of memory to her advantage, no matter who it hurts - herself included - and Pauling uses this premise to ask fascinating questions about the location of memory and thought. Extremely well done.

Lara Elena Donnelly, "Deathcap" (short story, Reactor, February 25, 2026)

Okay, so this one is pretty NSFW. It's two exhausted space marines who've barricaded themselves in an infirmary after events which read as a deliberate homage to Alien, but with the sexual assault subtext of the original movie made even more blatantly text. If that doesn't scare you off, then I will tell you what I liked about it: it's the sense of doomed characters at the end of their rope, and the study of what queer desire looks like in that scenario. What people will do, not even for the sake of survival, but just for the sake of being able to go out their way.

Danika Ellis, "Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point" (blog post, Book Riot, May 29, 2026)

This post really made the rounds at the end of May, and let's just say we discussed it in the group chat. It's an example of a post that goes viral more or less because it accurately sums up what most of us already knew. For obvious reasons, the situation is worst right now in kidlit, and I don't write kidlit. (Before you ask, IGNORE is not kidlit. It's New Adult. The difference between YA and New Adult is a whole other post that I'm not interested in making.) And if I have one mild criticism of the post it’s the relative lack of distinction between queer kidlit, which is being very loudly and directly attacked to near-extinction right now, and queer books for adults which are of course next on the list, but are currently suffering in a somewhat different and more indirect way. But that criticism is small. However you slice up the genres, it's bad right now for queer writers everywhere. We're all feeling it, and because of the incredible US-centricness of publishing (not to mention rising transphobia in other countries), even queer authors from progressive countries are feeling it.

It is important not to prematurely despair, because a lot of folks on the far right are very interested in making us prematurely despair and give up. Clearly queer books for adults are still being published. I published one in May, and it seems to have gotten reasonable traction for the career stage that I’m at. But it's hard not to look at the way the wind is blowing and feel afraid. I don't know what to do about or what advice to give, except to make a note: yes, ok, this is where we are right now, and the fear is real.

The More You Know!

Chavisory, "The problem of 'productivity'" (blog post, April 4, 2026)

Chavisory is unparallelled for her ability to look at neurodiversity discourse and point out - from a staunchly affirming, #ownvoices perspective - where it's not quite right. Where one of the community's simple truisms has gotten a little too simple to fully describe what's going on. This one is about capitalism and the drive to Accomplish All The Things, and particularly about why the latter cannot, in fact, be reduced to the former. I found it painfully relatable - but I don't think I could have said it in this way myself.

Autistic Book Shout-Out

Martha Wells, "Witch King" (novel, Tor, 2023)

I didn't love this as much as I love the Murderbot books - maybe it's just not possible for anything else to be as Murderbot as Murderbot - but I did love one of the secondary characters, Dahin, who reads as autistic to me. In a rich and well-realized fantasy world, Dahin is a sort of researcher; he goes off on his own investigating things and keeps to himself most of the time, but is open, curious, and forthcoming when the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes his lack of preconceptions about the world is a good thing - making him less susceptible, for example, to the fear and prejudice most people feel around our main character. Other times it makes him tactless and prickly. He reminds me a little bit of Daymar from Steven Brust's Draegera books, with the same sort of guilelessness and openness - but imagine a version of Daymar who actually gets drawn with nuance, and whose friends actually care about him and enjoy his company instead of complaining about him all the time. Murderbot itself is a famously resonant character for neurodivergent readers, but it's nice to see what Wells is able to do with an autistic-coded character who's human for a change.