The Ancillary Review of Books publishes reviews and essays with an emphasis on utopian impulses and systemic injustices. ARB seeks to build a community of radical thinkers writing about amazing, speculative, global writing. If you are interested in writing for ARB, please pitch us using the form below! Some works coming out this July that we’re interested in covering:
Fiction
- Give My Love to the Savages. Chris Stuck.
- We Have Always Been Here. Lena Nguyen.
- Strange Beasts of China. Yan Ge.
- The Fallen. Ada Hoffman.
Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices. Eds. Swapna Krishna & Jenn Northington.- A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Becky Chambers.
The Freedom Race. Lucinda Roy.- A Remedy in Time. Jennifer Macaire.
Paperclip. Seb Doubinsky.- The Past is Red. Catherynne M. Valente.
- She Who Became the Sun. Shelley Parker-Chan.
Non-Fiction
Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI. Gayle Rogers.- Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. Hua Li.
- Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics. Tobias Menely.
Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature. Lowell Wyse.- Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color. Anissa Janine Wardi.
Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media. Christina M. Knopf.- Making Art in Terrible Times. Ben Davis.
- Beyond State, Power, and Violence. Abdullah Öcalan.
- Pink Revolutions: Globalization, Hindutva, and Queer Triangles in Contemporary India. Nishant Shahani.
- Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground. Robin J. Hayes.
Coding Democracy: How Hackers Are Disrupting Power, Surveillance, and Authoritarianism. Maureen Webb.- Visual Cultures as Time Travel. Henriette Gunkel & Ayesha Hameed.
- Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles.
Other Review and Essay Options:
- ARB is interested in an essay or review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work (her next novel, Velvet Was the Night, comes out in August). Topics might include: her engagement with horror, gothic, and other genres; the importance of time and place in her fiction; Mexican and Mexican American culture in speculative genres. We welcome personal reflections and celebrations of her work, as well, and would love to see a Latinx author for this piece.
- ARB is interested in essays or reflections on or about the film The Green Knight (July 30). Topics might include gender and sexuality in period pieces or racial representation, erasure, and re-casting in adaptations of Arthurian or other “historical” tales.
- ARB is always broadly interested in pitches for essays about genre fiction, world literature, literature and media from below, cultural studies, and writing about systemic injustices and utopian impulses.
- If you’re interested in reviewing anything not on this list, please send us a pitch—we’re interested in a broad range of topics. For works published more than 5 years ago, we are interested in “retrospective reviews” that focus on why this text is worth revisiting.
- You can also see which titles ARB has available for review.
- We are accepting pitches for review and essay series, such as re-reads of an author.
- We are looking for contributors to ARB’s “Zoom and Enhance” series: essays that closely examine a small feature of a work, such as a single line of text or dialog.
- We welcome pitches for “Ancillary Guides” that introduce readers to an idea by way of a list of 5-10 books that are must-reads on a critical conversation, with brief commentary.
If you are interested in reviewing or essaying for ARB, please fill out the form below: let us know what you’d like to write about, and why you might be suited for it. While we welcome new writers, please point us towards any of your reviews or other writing if possible (personal blogs or Goodreads are fine). If there are multiple books for review that catch your eye, please list them in the order you’re interested in reviewing them.
Ancillary Review of Books 