Issue #7: Talking Romance With Radio 831, ACOTAR Pre-Orders, Best Series Poll

Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall host the Radio 831 podcast, where they talk about romance novels with the energy of sportscasters calling a Game 7. The genre pulled both of them back to reading after long breaks. In college, Sanj read 52 books in 52 weeks, landed on Beach Read, and devoured close to 500 romances in four months. She’s since taught a course on it at McNally Jackson and is training to be a psychologist. Tyler returned to reading during the pandemic with The Idea of You and Spoiler Alert; her own romance novel arrives in April 2027. Together, they chat about the genre’s cultural importance, the role of ACOTAR, which books are must-reads, and what makes spicy scenes work 🔥.

What is it about these books that got you both back into reading?
Tyler: There's a lot made about the predictability of genre fiction generally, but specifically with romance, you're going to have a formula, and they're going to end up with a happily ever after. There was something about that, especially during the pandemic, that I found very cozy and reassuring. Having boundaries like that gives authors a lot of room to surprise readers, defy expectations, and put new twists on expected tropes or familiar storylines. It was nice to read about people falling in love. 

Sanj: I grew up with a mom who loved period pieces, so I grew up watching the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and the like. I also grew up on Bollywood movies, which are super romance-heavy. So some of the earliest stories in my life were love stories, and I would never not love them. 

On another level, I'm also a therapist, and I spend a lot of time thinking about people's intimate lives. The specificity, the attention to intimacy feels connected to something deeply real about the world, in a way that I find very satisfying.

Is the happily ever after something that should be challenged? It seems so quaint!
Sanj: People can feel that way about it. But it comes back to what Tyler was saying: all forms of genre fiction have constraints of different kinds. You can't have a murder mystery without a murder. You can't have a sci-fi element without a sci-fi element. The fact that the constraint exists doesn't mean it isn't a vast, expansive experience, with different books for different readers. 

There have been a lot of think pieces about what it means to challenge the happily ever after, and I find that often they don't come from people who read in the genre. I think it would be really challenging to present something that is ostensibly a romance novel that doesn't care for the happily ever after. And I will say that "happy" is a complicated experience for people. "Ever after" is a complicated experience for people. It can mean really different things depending on the book. But you feel it when you feel it. 

Tyler: Normal People comes up in conversation a lot as being Sally Rooney's take on a romance novel, and it's not. It is a love story. Heart the Lover too — but that doesn't make them romance novels. It makes them love stories. There’s a distinction.

Romantasy has become one of the biggest forces in romance, and Sarah J. Maas is at the center of it. How do you think about the A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series in the context of the genre as a whole?
Tyler: Romantasy has obviously become such a huge driver of the romance category within the past several years, largely in part to ACOTAR and the success that series saw on TikTok. Of course, the combination of romance and fantasy has a much longer history — one of my favorites that I think fits in the genre is 2001's Kushiel's Dart — but the portmanteau "romantasy" is definitely a more recent trend. 

I think the popularity of ACOTAR and romantasy as a whole has cleared a path for readers to be more open about combining romance with other genres; for example, paranormal romances are starting to move further into the mainstream, and I think it's because people are down with non-human creatures finding love.

There used to be a time when one might have felt like they needed to hide what they were reading on an airplane. It seems like that moment has passed. What changed in the culture?
Sanj: I do think TikTok was a part of it. Romance readership has been enormous for so long. There are authors like Janet Dailey and Nora Roberts who sold more copies of their books than the Bible in the years when they were publishing. But the internet connectivity of knowing who else is reading the thing that you're reading didn't exist. A broader culture that is romance-skeptical was able to trick people into thinking that they were the only people in the world who liked this…maybe. 

If you've listened to the Fated Mates podcast, they've talked about how people used to write reviews of romance novels in the back of library books, so they could communicate to other people…

DeeSoul Carson reads wherever he can: at home, on the subway, at work (don’t tell his boss). A poet, educator, and aspiring literary critic, he favors contemporary poetry, especially debut collections, and his Want to Read list never stops growing. “It's all because I want an expansive view of what’s possible in poetic work as we step more and more into uncertain futures,” he says. When he’s not reading, DeeSoul is host of the O, Word? podcast and the author of the forthcoming The Laughing Barrel. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent program, and Baldwin for the Arts, among other honors. Learn more about him at deesoulpoetry.com and find him on Margins.

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