Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Author: Kim Fu
Publisher: Tin House Books
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1953534066

"The strange and wonderful define Kim Fu’s story collection, where the line between fantasy and reality fades in and out, elusive and beckoning." —The New York Times Book Review A LitHub, ALTA, and PureWow Best Book of the Month A BuzzFeed and WIRED Pick for a Book You Need to Read This Winter In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us. Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

For Today I Am a Boy

For Today I Am a Boy
Author: Kim Fu
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544032403

A son of Chinese immigrants discovers his true self in a “sharply written debut . . . a coming-of-age tale for our time” (Seattle Times). Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Winner 2015 PEN/ Hemingway Award, Finalist Lambda Literary Award, Finalist Longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection for Spring 2014 A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize At birth, Peter Huang is given the Chinese name Juan Chaun, “powerful king.” To his parents, newly settled in small-town Ontario, he is the exalted only son in a sea of daughters, the one who will finally fulfill his immigrant father’s dreams of Western masculinity. Peter and his sisters grow up in an airless house of order and obligation, though secrets and half-truths simmer beneath the surface. At the first opportunity, each of the girls lights out on her own. But for Peter, escape is not as simple as fleeing his parents’ home. Though his father crowned him “powerful king,” Peter knows otherwise. He knows he is really a girl. With the help of his far-flung sisters and the sympathetic souls he finds along the way, Peter inches ever closer to his own life, his own skin, in this darkly funny, emotionally acute, stunningly powerful debut. “Sensitively wrought . . . “For Today I Am a Boy” is as much about the construction of self as the consequences of its unwitting destruction—and what happens when its acceptance seems as foreign as another country.” —The New York Times Book Review “Subtle and controlled, with flashes of humor and warmth.” —Slate “Keeps you reading. Told in snatches of memory that hurt so much they have the ring of truth.” —Bust

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore
Author: Kim Fu
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0544227328

“A sensitive, evocative exploration of how the past threads itself through our lives, reemerging in unexpected ways.”—Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author At Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, campers are promised adventures in the woods, songs by the fire, and lifelong friends. Bursting with excitement and nervous energy, five girls set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore follows Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan beyond this fateful trip, showing us the lives of the haunted and complex women these girls become. From award-winning novelist Kim Fu comes a stunning portrait of girlhood, the nuances of survival, and the pasts we can’t escape. “[Fu] is a propulsive storyteller, using clear and cutting prose to move seamlessly through time . . . In the one-way glass of the novel, we watch the girls of Forevermore from a series of angles, in all their private anguishes. We lean closer, unable to turn away.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fu precisely renders the banal humiliations of childhood, the chilling steps humans take to survive, and the way time warps memory.”—Publishers Weekly “An unblinking view of the social and emotional survival of the fittest that all too often marks the female coming of age.”—Toronto Star “These portraits of sisterhood, motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, girlfriendhood, independent womanhood, and other female-identified-hoods sing and groan and scream with complexity and nuance, and they make me want to read her next ten books.”—The Stranger

Monster Culture in the 21st Century

Monster Culture in the 21st Century
Author: Marina Levina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1441185372

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Author: Caspar Henderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2013-05-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 022604484X

“Caspar Henderson takes us on an eye-opening tour of real animals that no sane human could ever have invented.” —Frans de Waal, New York Times–bestselling author With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change. A powerful combination of wit, cutting-edge natural history, and philosophical meditation, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is an infectious and inspiring celebration of the sheer ingenuity and variety of life in a time of crisis and change. “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is one that Pliny would have envied, Darwin applauded, and Borges relished . . . In these days of doom and gloom, I can think of nothing more rejoicing than Caspar Henderson’s magical book.” —Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading “Magnificent, bravura, beautiful and astoundingly interesting.” —The Sunday Times “Spell-binding, brilliantly executed, extraordinary.” —The Guardian

Monsters You Should Know

Monsters You Should Know
Author: Emma Sancartier
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 145216780X

“A humorous—and richly illustrated—book full of quirky monsters. SanCartier’s creatures are somehow both cute and terrifying.” —USA Today Meet the world’s most unusual monsters in this darkly funny collection of creatures and cryptids from folkloric history. Illustrator Emma SanCartier captures the bizarre and hilarious elements of seventeen monsters from around the world in a light, tongue-in-cheek tone, from the Japanese dream-eater Baku and the Persian carnivorous unicorn Shadhavar to the Eastern European Shurale, a literal tickle monster. Illustrated in lush watercolor, Monsters You Should Know is a perfect primer for the many strange, frightening, and compelling things that go bump in the night. “An important book on monsters you should know about, mostly because it turns out they’re really cute.” —Buzzfeed

Sad Monsters

Sad Monsters
Author: Frank Lesser
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2011-09-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110155116X

An Emmy Award-winning writer for The Colbert Report follows in the (big) footsteps of Bigfoot: I Not Dead. Monsters have it tough. Besides being deeply misunderstood, they suffer from very real problems: Mummies have body image issues, Godzilla is going through an existential crisis, and creatures from the black lagoon face discrimination from creatures from the white lagoon. At heart, these monsters are human; after all, you are what you eat. Quirkily illustrated, Sad Monsters hilariously documents the trials and tribulations of all the undead creatures monster-mad readers have grown to love, from vampires and werewolves, to chupacabras and sphinxes, and even claw-footed bathtubs.

The Laughing Monsters

The Laughing Monsters
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374709238

Denis Johnson's New York Times bestseller, The Laughing Monsters, is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game. Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago. Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.

Lovecraft in the 21st Century

Lovecraft in the 21st Century
Author: Antonio Alcala Gonzalez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000531651

Lovecraft in the 21st Century assembles reflections from a wide range of perspectives on the significance of Lovecraft’s influence in contemporary times. Building on a focus centered on the Anthropocene, adaptation, and visual media, the chapters in this collection focus on the following topics: Adaptation of Lovecraft’s legacy in theater, television, film, graphic narratives, video games and game artwork The connection between the writer’s legacy and his life Reading Lovecraft in light of contemporary criticism about capitalism, the posthuman, and the Anthropocene How contemporary authors have worked through the implicit racial and sexual politics in Lovecraft’s fiction Reading Lovecraft’s fiction in light of contemporary approaches to gender and sexuality

Some Trick

Some Trick
Author: Helen DeWitt
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811227839

Hailed a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Vulture, and the New York Public Library, Some Trick is now in paperback Finalist for the Saroyan Prize for Fiction For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most far-reaching dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,” a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even in the face of situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared” and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.” In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.”