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 check out our Procedures & Style Guide, and pitch us using the form below!
As we enter 2023, ARB is also looking to grow our editorial team; you can read more here if you’re interested.
ARB is always interested in critical essays on speculative fiction and related topics. We also invite pitches for guides: a brief introduction and a short annotated reading list for an author, topic, or subgenre. For reviews, here are some titles coming out in April that we’d be interested in covering:
Fiction
- Autodrive by Jordan Crandall
- The Winter Knight by Jes Battis
- Patterns of Orbit by Chloe N Clark
- My Brother the Messiah by Martin Vopenka, translated by Anna Bryson Gustova
- Collision: Stories From the Science of CERN edited by Rob Appleby & Connie Potter
- Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot, translated by Nathan H. Dize
- Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
- The Intruders by Brian Pinkerton
- The Cleaving by Juliet E. McKenna
- Descendant Machine by Gareth L. Powell
- Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee
- The Blue Is Where God Lives by Sharon Sochil Washington
- The Rooftop Garden by Menaka Raman-Wilms
- The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan
- The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due
- Everybody Do What You’re Doing by Adam Temple
- The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter
The Waves Extinguish the Wind by Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky, translated by Daniels Umanovskis - The Beetle in the Anthill by Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky, translated by Olena Bormashenko
- A Tidy Armageddon by BH Panhuyzen
- In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune
- Silenced by Ann Claycomb
- Rogue by Alex Schuler
- Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow
Non Fiction
- Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance edited by Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik
- Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes
Subsurface by Karen Pinkus - Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero by Chesya Burke
- Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France by Olivia C. Harrison
- Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science by Patrick Whitmarsh
- Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions by Isaac Vincent Joslin
- Post-Postmodernist Fiction and the Rise of Digital Epitexts by Virginia Pignagnoli
Other Review and Essay Options:
- 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.
- 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 writing 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. Please check out our Procedures & Style Guide to see how it works and what we’re looking for.
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