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Death‑Defying Lectures and Dragon‑Demons: Why Romantasy and Dark Academia Are Publishing’s New Power Couple
Let’s launch straight into the stacks, because 2025 is doing that thing where the romance section collides with the fantasy wing and they emerge… handcuffed, eye‑sexing, and unstoppable. Welcome to the thick of the romantasy‑and‑dark‑academia mash‑up, where smoky libraries, forbidden love, and dragon‑ridden ballrooms are all in fashion. Let me walk you through the syllabus—and…
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Death by Spreadsheet: Meanjin’s Execution and the Hollowing‑Out of Literary Culture
I woke up yesterday to find that Meanjin—the octogenarian Australian lit‑journal that once printed Patrick White and, more importantly, introduced me to Judith Wright’s poem about a lonely kangaroo—had been slipped a lethal injection by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP). No funeral cortege, no last meal, just a curt press release citing “financial head‑winds” (translation: the accountants…
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Why Dark Academia Refuses to Stay Buried: Greek Ghosts, TikTok Tweeds, and 2025’s Romantasy Invasion
I keep waiting for Dark Academia to shuffle back to whatever mist‑stained cloistered courtyard it crawled out of, but—like a PhD student on the seventh cup of tea at 3 a.m.—it will not go gentle. In 2025, the genre isn’t just alive; it’s staging an all‑campus occupation, annexing the romantasy shelves and mutating into ever‑stranger chimeras of…
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Alberta’s Great Book Glitch: The Day 1984 Was (Almost) Too Explicit
Category: Cultural Comment · Book Bans & Censorship I woke up to the oddest civic perfidy: Alberta, in its wisdom, decided The Handmaid’s Tale might be too graphic for school libraries. Yes, Margaret Atwood’s chilling dystopia—featuring stripped‑down color palettes and moral nightmares—was tossed into the same bin as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World…
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The Library on Fire: Ukraine’s Reckoning with Russian‑Language Literature
Category: Cultural Resistance · World Letters I was rummaging through an aging pile of Russian‑language paperbacks—*Pasternak’s poems, Chekhov’s short stories, a battered edition of Anna Karenina with dog‑ears in nearly every chapter—when it hit me: these books have become a kind of emotional UX nightmare for Ukrainians. They’re more than pages bound together; they’re fraught…
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Burn After Reading? Ukraine’s Quiet War on Russian Books
Category: World Literature I was running my fingers over the cracked spine of an old Penguin edition of Crime and Punishment—the one with Raskolnikov glowering like a hang‑dog prophet—when a headline pinged across my feed: Ukrainians are tossing their Russian‑language books into recycling bins, bonfires, and the occasional avant‑garde art installation. The Guardian piece framed…
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