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 August that we’re interested in covering:
Fiction
Velvet Was the Night. Silvia Moreno-Garcia.- Monkey Around. Jadie Jang.
- Shallow Waters. Anita Kopacz.
- Death Fugue. Sheng Keyi.
- Shadows of Eternity. Gregory Benford.
- The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman. Ed./transl. Melanie Magidow.
- Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories. Eds. Susan Forest & Lucas K. Law.
- Spirits Abroad. Zen Cho.
- First Law of Thermodynamics. James Patrick Kelly.
After the Dragons. Cynthia Zhang.- From the Caves. Thea Prieto.
- Reclaimed. Madeleine Roux.
- The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You. Maurice Carlos Ruffin.
- Jerusalem Beach. Iddo Gefen.
- Quertext: An Anthology of Queer Voices from German-Speaking Europe. Eds. Gary Schmidt & Merril Cole.
- In The Watchful City. S. Qiouyi Lu.
Non-Fiction
- Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color. Joy Sanchez-Taylor.
- Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. Jini Kim Watson.
- Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature. Katarzyna Bartoszynska.
Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Steven Shaviro.- The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire. Erica R. Edwards.
- A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Shannon Mattern.
- Robin and the Making of American Adolescence. Lauren R. O’Connor.
- The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government. Dario Gentili.
- Spirals of Revolt: Study and Struggle to Abolish the Present. Geo Maher.
- Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice. Kian Goh.
- Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa: Literature Between Critique and Utopia. David Johnson.
Other Review and Essay Options:
- With the release of the new Candyman film (Aug. 27), we are interested in essays or reflections on or related to the franchise. Topics might include: the work of Clive Barker, Nia DeCosta, or Jordan Peele; horror and race; and the history and current state of gentrification and redlining in Chicago or elsewhere.
- ARB is interested in an essay or review of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work. 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 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 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 