What has the most impact on your enjoyment of a book: plot, character, writing, other? I have to go with writing – if I don’t enjoy reading the words, nothing else matters. And if I do enjoy reading the words, nothing else matters. Of course, there are preferences but I think there’s very little more exciting than falling in love with a book you’d never have suspected.  What’s the first book you recommend to new friends? Probably whatever I’ve just finished or am in the […]

You’re the champion of the ‘monster smut’ tag. What would you recommend as a place to start for someone just dipping their toe (claw?) into the genre? I’m not sure if I’m honored or not! Monster Romance has become increasingly mainstream. The Shape of Water won best picture a few years ago, and that movie was absolutely a Monster Romance. She had sex with the fish man! Any romance between a human and a non-human can be described as Monster Romance, so A Court of […]

In our January Zoom chat, drmllz and tiny_bookbot discovered they had met in real life! Cannonballers in the wild – a rare sighting! What’s your favorite subject/angle to teach as a literature and media studies lecturer and researcher? What gets your students the most fired up? I’m happy to teach most things! In my ‘have PhD, will travel’ years, which were precarious and stressful, I taught everything from post-modernism to medieval poetry to ‘the eighteenth century’ to news framing in the media, often at very short […]