HILOBROW 4Q2025
By:
December 27, 2025
Here’s what HILOBROW published in October, November, and December 2025.
We’re grateful to our many stalwart contributors, and to first-time contributor (but long time HILOBROW friend) Al Deakin.
Also: During 4Q2025, we added this index page linking to all fiction (original, rediscovered, and cross-posted) that we’ve published here at HILOBROW since 2009. And Josh has continued to update the Radium Age Art thematic index, and the Radium Age Poetry thematic index.
BEST OF HILOBROW: 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025.
Also see: HYPOCRITE IDLER 4Q2025.
During 4Q2025, HILOBROW published SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM, a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on our favorite… ska songs! Here’s the lineup:
INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI | PLUS: AL Deakin on SKANKING FOR YOUR LIFE.
Josh Glenn is the SKANK series editor. He is very grateful to the series’ contributors, many of whom donated their honoraria to Covenant House, which provides housing and supportive services to youth facing homelessness.
In 2010–11, HILOBROW serialized Cocky the Fox, a swearing-animal novel by our friend James Parker (with illustrations by Kristin Parker). Earlier this year, James began re-telling the Cocky saga… in the form of an opera, here at HILOBROW!
During 4Q2025, we published further installments of COCKY: THE OPERA. Here’s the lineup:
- ACT TWO, SCENE ONE. Excerpt:
PATSY: The foxes used to follow me.
They’d fixate on my rear!
But now I’m in the creepy copse
and never a fox comes near.
Shall I whine? I shan’t.
I’m an agony aunt.
I’m an aunt in agony.
No pain upon this rainy earth
is alien to me. - ACT TWO, SCENE TWO. Excerpt:
NORTHSIDER #1: We’ve got windy concrete spaces,
we’ve got deadly anti-places,
blinding lights, and underbites, and foreign smells.NORTHSIDER #2: Won’t you join us on the Northside?
We’re so happy on the Northside!NORTHSIDER #3: Who’s going to fancy us
if we don’t fancy ourselves?
Josh Glenn’s SEMIOPUNK is an irregular series dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.” Here’s the 4Q2025 lineup:
- Ray Nayler’s THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA. Excerpt:
The octopuses are presented as a collective, embodied intelligence that communicates through a biologically integrated, non-human symbolic system. Their form of meaning-making is rooted in physical being rather than abstract thought, challenging our human-centric assumptions about what constitutes a “mind.”
- Charles Stross’s GLASSHOUSE. Excerpt:
Semioticians living through humankind’s hard-right turn, here in the 2020s, are well-placed to understand and bear witness to the sort of cognitive dictatorship on display in Glasshouse. Historical records are being deleted; collective memories are being altered. The resulting amnesia makes it impossible for people to know the true history of our social and cultural conflicts or the motives behind them, leaving us in a state of historical subjugation.
- Gordon Dahlquist’s THE DIFFERENT GIRL. Excerpt:
The intrusion of the “different girl” on Veronika’s island is an epistemological catastrophe. It’s precisely this sort of catastrophe that semioticians attempt to inflict upon ourselves, for each project. And then we attempt to inflict it upon our clients. We attempt to un-know what we thought was natural, normal, eternal, inevitable.
University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW shared a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Here’s the series lineup:
FIRST CONTACT | WHAT IF? | A HYBRID GENRE | COUNTERFACTUALS | A HOT DILUTE SOUP | I’M A CYBORG | APOPHENIC-CURIOUS | AN AESTHETICS OF DIRT | PAGING DR. KRISTEVA | POLICING THE GENRE | FAMILIAR STRANGENESS | GAME OVER | THE WORLD VIEWED | DEFAMILIARIZATION | SINGULAR CREATURES | ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST | THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCREEN-TIME | HOMO SUPERIOR | EVERYTHING IS US.
Josh’s other HILOBROW series include: SCREENSHOTS | PHOTO DUMP | HERMENAUTICA | NOT TODAY, EBAY
HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn is editor of the RADIUM AGE series of reissued proto-sf adventures from the MIT Press. During 4Q2025, the team continued to prepare the series’ Spring 2026 titles for publication. These are:
- E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (March 10), edited and introduced by Alexander B. Joy. “Flaxman Low is the Sherlock Holmes of the ghost world.” — The London Quarterly Review (1900)
- Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (March 31), introduced by Lucy Sante. “A gynarchic state, Armeria, where women marry each other and buy the babies on whom the future of Armeria depends… Readable and suggestive.” — The Occult Review (1909)
Exciting projects for Fall 2026 and beyond are in the works. As ever, keep an eye on this page for the latest updates.
As we have done for over ten years now, we continued to serialize some of Josh’s favorite Radium Age proto-sf stories and novels. Here’s the 4Q2025 lineup:
- Leslie F. Stone’s “The Fall of Mercury” (1935), cont.
- Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale (1902), excerpt, trans. Josh Glenn
- Fernande Blaze de Bury’s The Storm of London (1904), excerpt
- Marita Bonner’s The Purple Flower (1928)
HILOBROW published further installments in the series RADIUM AGE POETRY. Here’s a sampling of the 4Q2025 lineup:
Kochia Tseng’s FIRE IN THE SKY | Carrie W. Clifford’s WARNING | Max Jacobs’ HELL IS GRADUATED | Angela Weld Grimké’s TENEBRIS | Hirato Renkichi’s HOT-BLAST | Inagaki Taruho’s THE MAN IN THE MOON | D.H. Lawrence’s HOLD BACK! | Edward Silvera’s INTROSPECTION | Mykola Bazhan’s AERO-MARCH.
RADIUM AGE SERIES UPDATES: 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025. FULL SERIES INFO.
On to 1Q2026…