An Anti-Algorithm Media Compendium for Literary Folks
Our ultimate guide to short fiction, essays, cinema, music, magazines, newsletters, podcasts & long-form video | PART 1
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working on this handpicked & annotated compendium of things worth your time—short fiction to shake your soul, cinema that feels like a friendly ghost from a better universe, essays that crack open like a matryoshka doll, music for becoming and unbecoming, and so much more.
We hope for Strange Pilgrims to be a place of gentle repose on the hammock of conscious experience—digital and otherwise.
This entire post is completely free, and will always remain so. If it speaks to you, we’ll make it a series. We want these gems to reach anyone who needs them.
And if our mission resonates with you—if you believe in what we stand (and hope) for—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Doing so directly supports our efforts to slowly but surely build a truly indie, free, and accessible literary space for readers and writers alike.
Also, if there’s anything here that moves you, we hope you’ll restack it and share why. We’d love to overwhelm the algorithm with art & literature that is beyond a quick glance. Please also share in the comments what you love from this list, what you’d like to recommend—art and media that rules your imagination.
Okay, here we go!
⟡ Stories ⟡
Girl by Jamaica Kincaid | A masterclass in compression…the rhythm alone will stay with you for days.
Stone Animals by Kelly Link | Southern gothic doused in magic realism set aflame with the match of the ghost story.
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol | Peak absurdist horror…surreal, satirical, and somehow still unsettling nearly 200 years later.
Mrs. Mabb by Susanna Clarke | Fairy logic enwrapping a Victorian household with devastating consequences.
My Sad Dead by Mariana Enríquez | Argentine gothic that fuses ghost story with social commentary.
The Country Doctor by Franz Kafka | Impossible distances, nightmare logic, a perfect Kafka fever dream.
The Black Sheep by Italo Calvino | Flash Fiction as fable, distilling an entire moral universe into a few deceptively simple paragraphs.
The Wife’s Story by Ursula K. Le Guin | A perspective flip that reframes everything you think you know about transformation stories (also werewolves).
The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace | A scary-good must-read work of fiction for a writer in any genre wanting to learn how to balance the experimental with the emotional.
Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim | One of the best new short stories we’ve ever read, period.
⟡ Collections ⟡
Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez | Twelve stories that stretch and compress with the gum and glue of magic and melancholy, but never forget to entertain.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke | Joyful, enrapturing, and playing with themes of delightful danger, all rooted in folkloric and historical storytelling.
Honeycomb by Joanne Harris | Super short dark, original fairy tales that’ll make you feel simultaneously like a child wanting mama and a 100-year old wizard.
The Complete Stories by Leonora Carrington | Surrealist short fiction coloring the page with wild and warping language just as she painted her canvases.
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu | Fifteen fantastical and bittersweet stories drawn from Chinese myth, legend, and the Asian-American experience.
Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser | Sixteen stories, hyperrealistically married to weirdness, about disquiet at the heart of being human capturing strange and uncanny suburbia
Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro | Five linked stories set at night, always with music somewhere in the framing.
⟡ Essays ⟡
Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle | This essay opened our literary world up beyond what we can describe and undoubtedly it has done the same for many others, too. Short enough to read in five minutes, will stay with you forever.
The I in the Internet by Jia Tolentino | Capturing the internet’s descent from apparent utopia where everything was possible to an engine of self-delusion.
Stranger in the Village by James Baldwin | Baldwin uses a remote Swiss village where no Black person had ever been seen to illuminate how American identity—both Black and white—was forged through mutual estrangement, rage, and an irreversible entanglement that Europeans will never understand.
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus | Is life worth living in the face of the absurd?
Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf | Buying a pencil becomes an excuse to wander London streets at dusk in this meditation on self, observation, and the pleasure of eschewing identity.
On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien | The seminal essay that changed how we understand fantasy, first delivered as a lecture at St. Andrews in 1938.
⟡ Essay Collections ⟡
Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov | A collection of interviews, letters, and essays where Nabokov holds nothing back.
A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain | Part memoir, part meditation, all of it entirely its own thing. Published by Dorothy Project, beloved by writers who resist easy categories.
Mythologies by Roland Barthes | Essential for understanding how the everyday is always ideological, how nothing is just itself. After reading this, you’ll never look at an advertisement the same way.
⟡ Movies ⟡
8 ½ (1963) dir. Federico Fellini | The ultimate film about creative paralysis disguised as creative abundance.
His House (2020) dir. Remi Weekes | A refugee horror film that understands haunting as literal and political.
Spirited Away (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki | Miyazaki’s Alice in Wonderland by way of Japanese folklore and environmental anxiety.
Sister Midnight (2024) dir. Karan Kandhari | Fantastic, entertaining portrayal of female rage in an absurdist, hilarious domestic horror.
Incendies (2010) dir. Denis Villeneuve | Stunned me to the core but do NOT read anything about it. Just fucking watch it, please.
Oddity (2024) dir. Damian McCarthy | I can’t explain it but it’s slow-burn and fast-paced at the same damn time. Grief horror done RIGHT (aka not boring and actually effective).
The Cup (1999) dir. Khyentse Norbu | If this film doesn’t make you smile and want to love soccer (if you already don’t), then I don’t know what will.
Orlando (1992) dir. Sally Potter | Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid time-traveling nobleman, finally given the film adaptation it deserved.
Pyaasa (1957) dir. Guru Dutt | One of the best (and, sorry but also few) amazingly literary, beautiful Hindi cinema films.
⟡ Television ⟡
Midnight Mass (2021) created by Mike Flanagan | Religious horror on the outset but internally a meditation on faith, death, community, and addiction.
Scavenger’s Reign (2023) created by Joe Bennett & Charles Huettner | Unbelievably inventive piece of speculative storytelling that pretty much no one seems to have heard of…just lock in and experience it!
Dark (2017-2020) created by Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese | German puzzlebox of a series that’s short and brutally beautiful and seemingly confusing but also deeply inviting and, most important of all–it sticks the fucking landing.
Maniac (2018) created by Patrick Somerville | Fever-dream pharmaceutical romance fueled by two drool-worthy performances.
Undone (2019-2022) created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg & Kate Purdy | Rotoscoped animation about trauma, time, and whether you’re having a mental health crisis or experiencing an altered state of true transcendence.
Over the Garden Wall (2014) created by Patrick McHale | Ten episodes, eleven minutes each, a perfect, animated fairy tale epic.
My Lady Jane (2024) created by Gemma Burgess | Revisionist historical fantasy that asks: what if Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day reign went differently. Also, delightfully horny.
Evil (2019-2024) created by Robert King & Michelle King | Absolutely the best show you (probably) haven’t seen about a skeptic psychologist, a Black Catholic priest, and a non-practicing Muslim defeating EVIL in modern America.
Ted Lasso (2020-2023) created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt & Joe Kelly | We debated including this one on here because we thought everyone must have heard of this but K says none of the kids in the undergrad composition class he’s teaching have, so…kids in composition classes and everyone else – this is a beautifully joyful show about trauma, forgiveness, and oh yeah a bit of “football”. Sincerity at its finest.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2015) created by Toby Haynes | A perfect BBC adaptation of a perfect Susanna Clarke novel. Glorious, charming, magical, delicious.
⟡ Albums ⟡
Various Positions (1984) Leonard Cohen | Columbia Records refused to release this album in the US because they thought it would lose them money. This is also the album with one of the most recognizable and covered songs in the word: Hallelujah. And our personal favorite, much lesser known: The Night Comes On.
Arvo Pärt: Alina (1999) Arvo Pärt | Silence and sound dance the waltz and fall in love and it’s mesmerizing.
The Best of Nina Simone (1969) Nina Simone | The best doorway to her music all she stands for.
Night Song (2019) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan | Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, this will make you feel like you’re on a date with God.
One Go Around (2017) Jeffrey Martin | The Raymond Carver of indie folk and also the first person whose concert we watched live (in Toronto)!
Bearer of Bad News (2015) Andy Shauf | He plays almost every instrument himself, building these detailed sonic worlds for sad people. This concept album launched him into indie stardom.
The Empty Northern Hemisphere (2009) Gregory Alan Isakov | Lyrics that are nothing short of poetry and rooted in the realness of life while evoking a softer, sweeter existence (even if steeped in melodious melancholy).
At Swim (2016) Lisa Hannigan | I (Shannan) first started listening to Lisa when I was 14 and I remember wanting her to be my big sister. Her music is warm hug and a box of chocolates as well as the weeping willow and the long, lonely day…the beauty in the dissolution
Eternelle (1987) Edith Piaf | The world is transformed by love and immortalized by Piaf in this endlessly enigmatic album. Each song is iconic. And though many have tried, no one sings like her.
⟡ Literary Magazines ⟡
ONLY POEMS | Many of you have asked us if we accept poetry and while no, Strange Pilgrims doesn’t (or, rather, won’t) be publishing poetry, we do have a poetry magazine that we named after Only Fans but actually truly after Leonard Cohen’s The Only Poem.
Emergence | Award-winning, gorgeously designed digital and print magazine publishing essays, interviews, poems, fiction, photography, and art. They’ve also got a podcast now and you can engage with their work seamlessly on their website. It’s a whole experience and unlike anything we’ve seen in the lit mag space.
Splinter Journal | Clean, magical, intentionally crafted lit mag based in Australia. They’re super new and have just released their second issue. We’re rooting for them to redefine lit mag design!
Waxwing | A prestigious indie lit mag featuring work that’s been placed in many end-of-year awards anthologies. We love how the whole archive is free to access and read in a clean, simple interface.
Little Engines | A part-punk, part highbrow art-critic, part-rockstar, part-teen-with-a-dream vibes Substack-based lit mag featuring poetry, essays, columns, reviews, and lots more. They pay and are open to submissions right now!
Clarkesworld | Pretty much the zenith of sci-fi lit mags. Everything’s free to read and we can guarantee you’ll find something to enjoy in every single issue (released monthly).
⟡ Other Substacks ⟡
ONLY POEMS DAILY | A poem a day keeps the devil away.
Sub Club | Submission opportunities galore. I (Shannan) write and edit this Substack along with some other amazing people. We have something for writers at every stage.
Dear Head of Mine | Honestly, I don’t know why Sean’s newsletter doesn’t already have thousands of subscribers. He writes in such a human way about all things connected to editing and the publishing industry. And almost all of it’s free!
The Intrinsic Perspective | One of our favorite Substacks encompassing everything from literature to culture to history to art to the digital world to our potential demise but also our great upliftment to…you get my point. Half of the posts here are also free so you can read a good chunk before making a paid dive.
⟡ Podcasts ⟡
Literature & History (2016-present) hosted by Doug Metzger | Long, organized episodes replete with philosophical, historical, and cultural analyses of seminal literary works.
Imaginary Worlds (2015-present) hosted by Eric Molinsky | An award-winning speculative literary podcast featuring conversations with novelists, screenwriters, artists, and more on crafting, well, imaginary worlds.
The History of Literature (2015-present) hosted by Jacke Wilson | Started in 2015 with the intention to answer the question “is literature dying?” this podcast very wonderfully proves that no–literature has and always will be, well and alive and, sometimes, downright iconic.
Backlisted (2016-present) hosted by John Mitchinson & Andy Miller | Diving into forgotten or overlooked books, the hosts and guests have a lot of fun as they joyously leap into tangents about publishing history and personal reading obsessions. Needless to say, every episode makes you want to order the book in question immediately.
Books of Some Substance (2014-present) hosted by David Southard, Nick Scandy, & Nathan Sharp | Notable episodes have covered books like The Brothers Karamazov, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity’s Rainbow but even the books you might not have heard about are worth learning about through these wonderful hosts who never really flounder around much (can be pretty rare in podcasters, hah!)
⟡ Long-Form Video ⟡
If we could, we’d include every single Leonard Cohen interview here. But in the interest of some semblance of objectivity, we’ll start with just one. As ever, you’ll find a disarmingly honest man at once touching the shore of material life while immersed in a degree of mysterious transcendence.
Oh the times of yore when real conversations took place in smoke-filled rooms with people who, despite intellectual friction, rejoiced in the rigor of the adventure it is to reach at truth—emotional and otherwise!
A 4-hour documentary tracing how Freudian ideas about the unconscious were weaponized by corporations and politicians to turn citizens into consumers, transforming democracy from rational engagement into the management of irrational desires.
Excavating temporal illusions—why childhood lasted forever but decades now disappear, why certain events feel impossibly recent or ancient, and the strange mechanisms our brains use to place things in time when we can’t actually grasp its scale.
Marlon Brando was a divisive and, to some, difficult figure to comprehend. He was one of the original famous antidisestablishmentarianist artists.
As problematic as Charlie Rosen is, this interview is absolutely worth experiencing because Toni Morrison’s charisma and intellect and heart are on full display here.
A brilliant, weaving, dare I say sweating, interview where Wallace essentially predicts the conundrum we’re in today.
Arendt talks about maintaining plural human capacities—thinking and acting, beginning and enduring—not as ideals but as practiced realities in a world that wants to flatten us into work-consume cycles.
May you make beautiful art,
Wow! The scope of this is impressive, and I so appreciate the curation. These lists are mouth-watering.
SO jazzed to see someone honoring the absolute genius of Gregory Alan Isakov🥲