Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Preliminary Round
Choose a book:
Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton
Leagues and Legends series by E. Jade Lomax
Voting ended onFeb 8, 2025
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton (Wisconsin Gothic #1)
Endorsement from submitter: "Gay urban fantasy in Madison, WI"
A graduate student and an archivist work together to fight a god.
Fall, 1969. Ulysses Lenkov should be working on his dissertation. Instead, he's developing an unlucrative sideline in helping ghosts and hapless magic users. But when his clients start leaving town suddenly—or turning up dead—he starts to worry there's something afoot that’s worse than an unavenged death or incipient insanity. His investigation begins with the last word on everyone's lips before they vanish: the mysterious Dionysus.
Sam Sterling is an archivist who recently moved back to Madison to be closer to the family he's not too sure he likes. But his peaceful days of teaching library students, creating finding aids, and community theater come to an end when the magnetic, mistrustful Ulysses turns up with a warning. There's a god coming, and it looks like it's coming for Sam.
Soon the two are helping each other through demon attacks, discovering the unsavory history of Sam's family, and falling in love as they race to find a solution. But as the year draws to a close, they'll face a deadly showdown as they try to save Sam—and the city itself.
Leagues and Legends series (Beanstalk: The Adventures of a Jack of All Tales, Echoes of a Giantkiller, Remember the Dust) by E. Jade Lomax
Jack Farris doesn’t want to save the world, just every person he knows, encounters, or hears of.
It’s a bit of an issue.
S. Grey doesn’t want to save anyone but himself. He wants to know everything and majoring in sagework at the Academy is the best way to do that.
Laney Jones left her home to avoid the constraints there, only to find different barriers holding her back at the Academy. Eager to learn, to excel, to escape, she has far from given up.
Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh would just like everything to be orderly, thank you very much, but it seems the only way to make monsters and myths (and malicious but mundane men) to stop rampaging through his world is to go out and do some hero-ing himself.
They are put together as an unwilling study group, but they become something more.
Fantasy, epic fantasy, adventure, secondary world, series, young adult
This week we're talking about new technologies, platforms, and formats of storytelling! The tentpoles this week are the first episode of Campaign Skyjacks, the interactive fiction game Stay by E. Jade Lomax, and the twitter threadfic Still Waters aka Turtl...
This week we're talking about new technologies, platforms, and formats of storytelling! The tentpoles this week are the first episode of Campaign Skyjacks, the interactive fiction game Stay by E. Jade Lomax, and the twitter threadfic Still Waters aka Turtle Creek.
What We’re Into Lately
Untamed by Anna Cowan
The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
Qi hun
Hades
Yesterday Upon The Stair by PitViperOfDoom
24 Hours in the Past
The Repair Shop
History Cold Case
Other Stuff We Mentioned
These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
Patricia Highsmith novels
Hikaru No Go manga and anime
The Queen’s Gambit
Great British Bake Off
“Birds Are Trying to Reinvent Your Heart” by Jennifer Mace
“Eat prey, love” by Freya Marske in Unnatural Order
Mermaids Monthly
Weekend at Bernie’s
Milliways RPG
My Brother, My Brother, and Me
The Adventure Zone
Critical Role
Serial Box
The Witcher
Person of Interest, aka “The husbands show”
The Harper Hall of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
Pirates of the Caribbean
Groundhog Day
Sleep No More
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Mass Effect 3
Stephen King’s It
It (2017)
It (2019)
Homestuck
Blaseball
The War of the Worlds radio show
Welcome to Night Vale podcast
Alice Isn’t Dead (presented by Welcome to Night Vale)
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries webseries
The Magnus Archives podcast
The Bright Sessions podcast
The Archers radio play
‘Fan Is A Tool-Using Animal’ talk by Maciej Cegłowski
Delicious website
Macey’s audio fiction “A Cradle of Vines” out with Cast of Wonders
Macey’s upcoming audio fiction piece with GlitterShip
Snow White folktale
For Next Time
Nothing! It's the Extravaganza, and we've got an extra-special surprise for you!
Transcription
The transcript of this episode can be found here. Thank you as always to our stunningly talented team of scribes!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
A boy walked out of the mountains and learned how to not be selfish. Hero wasn't a compliment in every house and he never claimed the title. He wanted to be a librarian.
Several years later a stone girl was taken out of the mountain and learned how to be human again.
When does a mountain become a woman?
When does a monster become a child?
This was supposed to be about rupert... its about cassandra oops sorry not sorry. Based off of the amazing series written by @ink-splotch
When Jack turned around, a tall dark-skinned girl he’d seen on campus a few times looked him up and down. It was the most demanding gaze Jack had ever been put under. He felt like he ought to empty his pockets, and maybe apologize. “You must be Farris,” said the girl with a purple mage’s band on her shoulder. She offered a hand to shake. “I’m Laney Jones.”
Laney, the love of my life, is from @ink-splotch‘s Leagues and Legends series, aka the books that have my heart forever and always and are available for download from the author for free here because she is amazing
They were anthologies. They were dictionaries and thesauruses for words he would never be able to translate. They were plays and rotting scrolls and old love letters and standing rune stones worn by centuries. They were being written before his ink-smudged nose. He would never catch up; he would die trying to read all of them, to find their translations, the best poems in their worst days.
Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Preliminary Round
Choose a book:
Shadowfall by Iris Foxglove
The Alliance Trilogy (Sneak, Liar, Traitor) by E. Jade Lomax
Voting ended onFeb 8, 2025
Book summaries below:
Shadowfall by Iris Foxglove (Immortals Descending #2)
It is said the demon in the well will give you your heart's desire…for a price.
When Declan's prince and best friend, Arwyn, goes seeking the demon for himself, he surprises Declan by leaping into the demon’s well. But when Declan pulls him out, it isn't Arwyn he rescued, but a demon wearing his skin. No one believes Declan that Arwyn's soul has been corrupted by the shadow in the well, and with Arwyn taking up arms against the king's fleet by becoming a pirate, all that matters is stopping him.
When Arwyn offers him a terrible bargain, Declan agrees, hoping it will finally give him the truth about what happened to his prince…and a chance to find the man he'd loved since childhood.
But Arwyn isn’t a demon. He’s a god, and he is very, very good at knowing what people really want. He is convinced that for Declan, it isn't the prince who went into the water that has captivated him…but the shadow that came out of it.
Romance, fantasy, secondary world, adult
The Alliance Trilogy (Sneak, Liar, Traitor) by E. Jade Lomax
A century ago, the general chosen to lead the armies of the Nerian Alliance against their shared enemies deposed the allied kings he served.
With loyal soldiers behind him, the general conquered their three kingdoms in the name of unity and strength.
Now, the vast swathe of land that was the Alliance is known simply as Neria. The old borders and the old ways are forgotten— by most.
This is the story of a princess called Sasha and a rebel named Andrea, neither of whom are as righteous as they think they are.
It is the story of Will, an ambitious amateur spy, and Gabrielle, the equally ambitious youngest princess, who are not as smart as they think they are.
This is Gregory’s story, about a shy young mountain lad who is not as useless as he thinks, who is not as harmless as he thinks.
They all have a long way to go.
Fantasy, epic fantasy, secondary world, series, young adult
