Fei Dong

Hello bookworms of Toronto! If you love literary trivia, supporting publishing professionals of colour, and correcting someone when they’re wrong, come check out Um, Actually trivia night, hosted by BIPOC of Publishing in Canada (and co-emceeed by me)! www.eventbrite.ca/e/um-actuall...

Matter Over Mind: Review of R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis Fei Dong Under Review:Katabasis. R. F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, August 2025. In her best-selling novel Babel, R. F. Kuang wrote of how the ivory towers of the academy are entwined with the work of wo…

Matter Over Mind: @feidong.bsky.social reviews R.F. Kuang's KATABASIS, out this week from @harpervoyagerus.bsky.social!

ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/08/28/m...

Augur press novella and novelette submissions now open! Be a part of augur press’ debut line up. We’re looking for works from 12,500-40,000 words to launch as print books in 2027-2029. Canadian & international authors welcomed. Open July 6-August 30. Guidelines at augursociety.org/press-submissions.

HEY SFF WRITERS 👋✨

We want your books.

So we can acquire them.

And print them.

For our ✨🪶 SOON TO BE LAUNCHED PRESS 🪶✨

Submissions are open until August 30. 12.5k-40k words.

Guidelines are live on our site, found down-thread.

Pass it on 👀

Two Truths At Once: Review of The Dragonfly Gambit by A.D. Sui A thousand-year intergalactic empire, a twenty-year war, and a revenge plot ten years in the making—how does A.D. Sui pack it all in a 142-page novella?

New book review on my Substack! In The Dragonfly Gambit, A.D. Sui hones grand, dramatic prose to their sharpest potential, deftly manages a paradoxical, cat-and-mouse power struggle.

A little something in between commission work and projects: enjoying #heygirliegame (even though I'm unfamiliar with #d20)

I had the honor of being Lucy Frostblade’s sprite artist in #heygirliegame and fell head over heels 💘 please check out the game if you haven’t already, link is below!

a new substack essay about writing for the fan-made lesbian dating sim #heygirliegame (set in the world of dimension 20’s fantasy high), the parasocial tendencies of readers, and why i’ll never use chatgpt.

open.substack.com/pub/feidong/...

ONE MORE DAY!

A screenshot from Genius.com breaking down the lyrics of Lisa Gilroy's freestyle Sam diss track 'Fuck You Sam'.

who did this

It really says something about me that I got really excited about finding a Substack dedicated to Microsoft word macros

happy Pierre Poilievre Is Unemployed Day to all observing 🥳

from all the girlies (gender neutral) at work on team gertie, see y’all at basrar’s 😉

Hey, Girlie! by ray 蕭, pysics, ffffrogs, dearheartling, diane, Kelpipop A Fan-Made Kristen Applebees Dating Sim

hello dimension 20 fans of bsky, there’s less than a month until #heygirliegame, the fan-made kristen applebees dating sim visual novel, drops on itch.io on may 17. check us out!

raddishradish.itch.io/hey-girlie

love BETWEEN TWO FIRES! very Dark Souls energy with some neat deep cut medieval Christian nonsense

Raising the Stakes: Review of Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao From Iron Widow to Heavenly Tyrant, Wu Zetian goes from "fucks around" to "finds out."

when reading this queer SFF dystopian, me and a friend both thought, “yeah, yeah, the mecha fights are cool, but can we get back to people sitting around a room talking about politics? thanks!” and the Heavenly Tyrant replied, “YES!” #BookReview

open.substack.com/pub/feidong/...

36 pages into SOTR and I’m already crying.

Finished Heavenly Tyrant. Time for Sunrise on the Reaping.

The Water Is Fine Chloe Ament · Daisies · Song · 2021

listening to this on repeat while I think about Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots

open.spotify.com/track/3gS0Vr...

Image is from Black Women Reproductive Justice. Pink background with International #TransDayOfVisibility hashtag at the top and a pink, light blue, and white flag in the middle

"Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) is a day to celebrate the lives and contributions of trans people, while also drawing attention to the disproportionate levels of poverty, discrimination, and violence the community faces compared to cisgender people."
text: glaad.org/tdov/
image: blackrj.org

KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS KATABASIS

these 2 bad bitched have been neck and neck for a week. as soon as I finish both, it’s sunrise on the reaping time.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

If you’ve published a book — enter your name… www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Mickey 17 is a really fun and great movie! It is also a movie that was really sure Trump was gonna lose the election, which, as I was watching it, made me think “Oh I’m not watching a dystopian movie. I’m living in the dystopia — the movie’s the escape.”

What does “gender equality” look like in such a militaristic, colonial world?

It’s not just “well I think women can be soldiers too,” is it.

not even in a “I’m not like other girls” kind of way, but it truly questions the systematic forces that socializes/oppresses women, then the messy imperfect work of undoing that system

What’s also interesting about Iron Widow / Heavenly Tyrant is that, though both books, at a glance, revolves around A Heterosexual Marriage, it tries to explore that het marriage through a queer lens — bc of polyamory, bc of characters explicitly pushing back against gender roles

Heavenly Tyrant is just scenes after scenes of “the worst man you know just made a really good point.”

had to dig up my uni notes on Russian Formalism to write this review of The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (@tordotcom.bsky.social). enjoy! feidong.substack.com/p/defamiliar...

Got a question for our upcoming Brockton Writers guest speaker or readers? Drop it in the comments.

If you see this, quote it with what you're reading this weekend!

Savoring an ARC of Katabasis by RF Kuang… but mostly I’m finally getting around to Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao