The weather is getting nicer and the days are slowly stretching out a little more — some days are just begging for some outside reading at a coffee shop or park, right? If you’re looking for some new reads, have no fear!

March brings the official start of spring, and lucky for us, it also brings a lot of great new nonfiction books. Here are ten new nonfiction books out this month that I’m really looking forward to. There are several memoirs told in unexpected ways, an accessible book about physics in everyday life, an examination of spirituality and science, a timely history book about how fascism can be spread, and a slice of history of the NBA, to name a few. There’s also a memoir about birding, family, and nature, which is perfect for the spring season.  

This is, by far, not an exhaustive list of all the nonfiction releases this month. If you’re looking for even more new releases, check out our New Release Index, full of forthcoming new releases. It’s organized by release date, and you can set preferences for genre, as well!

Memoir, science, history, sports — there’s lots to take in this month. Let’s take a look at some of these new books, shall we?

Like the excitement surrounding a much-anticipated season finale, closing poems are an occasion, but that’s not to say that I don’t love all the other parts of a poetry collection. In fact, I read books from the title to blurbs, although not always in that order. Fascinated by the “Notes” and “Acknowledgements” sections, I pretty much always read the back matter before finishing the main attraction.

One reason for skipping around: I want the final page, poem, sentence, line, then word of a work to be the last thing I read. I prefer to savor endings, to bask in my feelings. Plus, the last lines of closing poems end a piece and a collection, leaving readers with a sense of clarity and closure and sometimes an opening. So, I guard that space by finishing the endpages beforehand.

In recent years, my interest in poetry has multiplied, especially my curiosity about how everything from a poem to a collection comes together. I peruse poetry chapbooks and collections, craft essays, interviews, and podcasts. While writing this, gratitude for “Ada Limón on How to Write a Poetry Collection” from Literary Hub and Chet’la Sebree’s online course “Exit Strategies: How to End a Poem” via Hedgebrook kept arising. Knowing their invaluable lessons swim in my brain and inform my readings, I celebrate them here.

A devoted rereader and someone rendered speechless and still by choosing favorites, I often look to my rereads to learn and observe what moves me. Because word limits, I utilize that approach in this essay. Now, onto those go-to, heart-grabbing closing poems.

Again and again, I reference the constellation of poems taped to my bathroom mirror. Those memorized pieces feel like friends. Even when I’m not revisiting or reciting them, they, similar to the formative books stacked in my writing space, loom in their comforting, inspiring way. The six touchstones include a closing poem, “Object Permanence.” This love poem of love poems ends Ordinary Beast. I’ve read Nicole Sealey’s debut collection exploring family, friendship, mythology, and race five times, but I don’t even know how to begin to describe the number of times I’ve turned to its final poem.

Gothic is a word that embodies so many different things. It can call up ornately designed cathedrals, haunted houses, heavy black eyeliner, and dance moves like picking cobwebs out of the air, to name a few. There is something that unites these ideas. There’s a fascination with mortality and the macabre side of things. These ideas come out in gothic literature as well, stories that focus on fear, monsters, and things that haunt us. The aesthetics of the genre make it easy for gothic literature lovers to broadcast their tastes through avenues like clothing and home goods. Trends come and go, but black never goes out of style. And the real ones will only stop wearing it once they create a darker color.

I’ve pulled together this creepy collection of gothic goodies. Most of them are inspired by the classics of gothic literature like Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. Other items are the perfect bookish accouterments to your perfect gothic reading day. You know the day. It’s very glum, and a cozy sweatshirt, a glowing candle, and a hot cup of coffee are necessary to arm you against the chill of your manor (you do live in a manor, right?) and the creeping dread.

The painter and poet Florine Stettheimer should have been easy to cook from. Her poetry, commercially published for the first time in the 2010 collection Crystal Flowers, has a section devoted to “comestibles”—including airy tributes to ham, bread, and tomatoes with Russian dressing—and her paintings often portray food. She was born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York in the late eighteen hundreds, part of a social circle that included Neustadters and Guggenheims, and she held salons that were a Who’s Who of the New York art world. (Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, and Leo Stein were regulars.) Stettheimer did not oversee the cooking, but part of her work’s deliberate feminine aesthetic involved recording the parties, personalities, dishes, outfits, interiors, furniture, and floral arrangements that made up her life. On one canvas, Soirée, a plate of salad and pitcher of cocktails adorn a table in the foreground of a drawing-room scene, where assembled luminaries gaze at Stettheimer’s paintings-within-the-painting. These were unorthodox choices for a woman artist of her time—many others made strenuous efforts not to seem too overtly feminine.

Yet perhaps this femininity was also subversive. Today’s art world is reevaluating Stettheimer in the wake of the publication of Crystal Flowers and a 2022 biography by Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer, published by Hirmer. Bloemink situates Stettheimer as a surprisingly modern figure whose “female” topics—furniture and domestic interiors, flowers and frills, diaphanous fabrics, social events, her family, social narratives—were presented both unapologetically and with a wry, critical distance. Through the witty, effervescent tone of her poems and the originality of her painterly technique, she transformed her subjects into baubles for the artist’s gaze—and in so doing, de-gendered them. The following untitled poem is representative: “Mary Mary of the / Bronx aerie / How does your V garden / Grow? / with beans and potatoes / peas and tomatoes / and shiny bugs all in a / Row” is representative. Stettheimer’s choice of wording and image show the poem to be about making art, not salad. The “V garden” is cheekily abbreviated; its rhyming food is aesthetic and playful.

To cook from Stettheimer’s work, then, would be to acknowledge that her interest in food was not literal. In the section “Comestibles,” rhyming ditties, light as meringue, are entry points into discussions of sex and desire. Stettheimer went about this with a frankness unusual for the time period, and with a dollop of irony as well. A “comestible” is alimentary but not elementary; the fancy and fanciful word removes food from the cupboard and makes it more like art, if a bit unconventionally. In one poem, Stettheimer writes: “You stirred me / You made me giddy / Then you poured oil on my stirred self / I’m mayonnaise.” A frothy crush comes to a gluey and unsexy end in a mere four lines. Another untitled poem runs, “You beat me / I foamed.” In the next lines, its subject is “drowned” in sweetness and “parceled” out. She concludes, “You made me hot – hot – hot / I crisped into ‘kisses.’” Here, Stettheimer puts a lover’s attempts at mastering her into her oven and bakes them into female pleasure.

When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.

I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it.

Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension.

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes.

Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.”

We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. 

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.

Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”

I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then “Another night I’m in the magic mirror / Another night engaged in seeing signs,” it felt like, well, a sign. Symbols, like mirrors, are roads to the other side; I have always been obsessed with looking for and in both. Though both of my trips actually happened, their allegorical affinity made them each less real, and harder, somehow, to return from. Seeing yourself through reflections can be a way of playing dead, of getting lost where you are not; in Full Moon Mystery Garden, it is also a way to get found.

The album’s sigillic scenery is almost too familiar: black cat, black Polo, moon, mountain, mirror. But Wicca has an uncanny ability to show us what are basically gothic stock images under a strange new light, reanimating them. If similarly symbolically-hyperactive Bladee’s falsetto makes incantations out of normal nouns, Wicca’s hoarseness brings the otherworld to earth: rural Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island. That’s magic, I guess—or music. Wicca’s older work is equally lyrically brilliant, but more claustrophobic: words are exchanged in bedrooms, in clubs, over text, in bad relationships. Now, he’s alone in a car looking out, “the twilight on repeat.” The album, which has four different songs with the word moon in the title, drives you along a kind of psychogeographic cul-de-sac, a looping map of road signs that seem to occur in too many places at once—the same way certain American towns all look the same, the way they all have a Main Street, a Crescent Street, and trees at their edges. Ex–emo teens will recognize the landscape. The album’s frequent refrain—“In one mile, turn left on Garden Avenue”—is spoken by a female GPS. Though he knows what road he’s on (“Dark Region Road”) and where he’s going (the “portal through the pines,” “Hickory Grove”), he still needs directions: a voice from elsewhere, an image out there that lets him recognize what he already knows. Funny how another person’s words can lead you gradually back to a place where your self and your world coincide—to life. “The meadow isn’t that far away,” and the mystery, meanwhile, is here.

I was on a back road by myself
In Waverly Township
Totally immersed in where I was and what I felt
Amazing how a simple drive
Can open my eyes
To what is out there

—Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

Given a space to inhabit unobserved, I will immediately convert it into a physical representation of the inside of my brain. My annual trip to the old Zillow listing for the farm I bought eight years ago leaves me stunned every time: it was once the kind of house one could list on Zillow! Now it is mine; I have filled the walls with pictures,hung the surplus ones on the ceiling, crowded every surface with dioramas and precarious unidentifiable objects that look like chess pieces from outer space. There is nowhere to sit in the house except on the floor with the dogs (and, every hatching season, with the emu chicks who run figure eights around the obstacle art). Like my brain, it’s a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

My house, the physical building, is an arranged marriage of two old farmhouses that were dragged from different parts of the country and clumsily conjoined. I decline to speculate on which side is holding up the other. There is a secret spiral staircase, accessed through a cupboard door, with ludicrously uneven treads; the wavy glass windowpanes cast distorted shadows. The two halves of my house must have each accommodated entire families, but the current inhabitants between them, in descending order of population, are: eggs, birds, dogs, me. 

Every morning around eleven, having done the farm rounds and broadcast feed to the loyal birds, I commence with the small-scale batch production of objects that promise but do not fulfill utility. I tend to work compulsively and repetitively, making hundreds of variations of the same thing until I exhaust my supply of the necessary materials or my own fascination with it. There are blown-out, intact eggshells equipped with antennae or working motion sensors; eggshells hinged to open like boxes, or with latched hatches, lined with poppy red flocking; emu egg dirigibles rigged with ball chains, hanging from the kitchen rafters. Over the  past six months, I’ve manufactured thousands of one-inch hollow resin spheres, each kitted out with some combination of magnets, O-rings, and fishing tackle and beads. Each one of them is perfect, and the only people who see them are the bewildered tradesmen who need access to the circuit breaker in my kitchen.

I love birds most for the combination of complexity and stupidity they exhibit: their deep-seated, unplumbable impulse to perform elaborate, apparently pointless procedures. The contents of my house demonstrate that it is an impulse I share.

This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.

I looked at the objects in the house

In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.” Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–27 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.

Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.

Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.

***

What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell.

The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.

I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing one way; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.

—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader

Last week, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker delivered his State of the State address. It is the first time a governor in the country has directly spoken about the wave of censorship, book banning, and harassment being seen by schools and libraries. While some legislators in other arenas have addressed the topic — Jamie Raskin, a Congressional Representative from Maryland, for example — it continues to be a topic that not enough of those who have the power are using to discuss. Meanwhile, over a dozen bills have been proposed across the country that would remove queer books from libraries and schools and/or actively prosecute professionals who have that material in their collections.

While Pritzker sets up the state to be a book sanctuary and model for supporting public education, it should be terrifying to consider how each state may differ in terms of what and how students have access to truth, factual history, and voices of those who are marginalized. We already know that abortion being left to the states is creating dangers and life-threatening consequences for pregnant people, and we know that state standards and funding for education are already deeply disparate, depending on where you live.

Why should a student from Illinois who sits next to a student from Florida in their college lecture halls have had radically different access to voices, stories, and information professionals?

They shouldn’t.

Here’s the excerpt of Pritzker’s 2023 State of the State speech about the current rise of dangerous nationalism and the impact it has on schools and libraries. May this be the model for other states. Read it, share it, and use it to write to your legislators about why they need to speak up against this virulent nationalism and anti-intellectualism that denies students their First Amendment Rights.

One very easy way to learn about and discover new books and authors is through the cover reveal. This was not a possible avenue of discovery before the age of book talk on the internet, and in an era where visuals are becoming more and more important — and indeed, book cover designers are taking the reality of the online world into account when determining how to create a book’s image — covers can do a lot of service for readers. In this new weekly feature, we’ll round up some of the most interesting cover reveal news from the prior week.

These cover reveal news posts will share the covers, any credits to artists and designers given with the reveal (something which should be standard practice but still is not), and then the book’s publication date and description. That information will all come from Amazon, as they have the most robust and update descriptions at the time of cover reveals. Reveals sometimes happen 6, 9, or even 12 months in advance of an actual release.

Use these reveal posts to build up your TBR, to preorder titles that catch your fancy, or to begin placing library holds/requesting titles for purchase at your library. There will be something for everyone here, crossing genres and categories of reading interests.

This week’s cover reveal roundup includes a second chance quiz show romance, gender bending body switching, a radical leprosy community, and more.

One Piece is one of the most popular anime series out now. It got its start as a serialized manga getting published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1997 and by 1999 it was made into an anime, and has since aired over 1,000 episodes. While it’s not quite the longest-running anime, there’s something to say about a series that can keep viewers interested past the usual dozen or so episodes anime have. Suffice to say that fans of the massive series have been rocking with Monkey D. Luffy on his quest to become the Pirate King and get the famous One Piece treasure for a while now. They’ve laughed and cried as he’s lost and gained friends, fought enemies, and avoided capture. Understandably, a series of this size inspires just as sizable a desire within fans to relive their favorite moments, and even to put out the beacon signal in the wild to other potential fans. For that, we’ve got the best One Piece merch below. In this list, you’ll find all manner of One Piece hoodies, Zoro merch, and other goodies that’ll have you thinking of the best moments in the show.

And, if you’re curious about getting into One Piece, but feel like starting it is too daunting, try this guide, then shimmy on down to this list of One Piece merch right after.

One Piece Clothing

This Zoro merch marks a time of great character growth for the swordsman. UNIQLO has it for $20.

Gain the power of devil fruit with this long-sleeved shirt. Just mark sure you stay out of the ocean. Head over to Crunchyroll for this one. $35

Rep the Straw Hat Pirates with this simple One Piece hoodie. $50

With 2023 moving full steam ahead now, it’s hit me that the early 2000s occurred a solid 20 years ago. The fact that there now exists a That ’90s Show in place of That ’70s Show feels like a surreal, out-of-body experience. How has the time sped by this fast? It’s like I’ve pressed the fast forward button on my family’s VCR and accidentally skipped further ahead in life then I intended, only to want to rewind back a bit.

Despite how much each generation likes to poke fun at Millennials — we are the generation of the Facebook “poke” feature, after all — we grew up in a truly unique era. We have straddled two distinct time periods: life before smartphones and the Cloud, and life after. We are the last generation to remember the way things were before this major technological shift. As I compare the days of my childhood to my life now, I find myself casting a glow of nostalgia over my ’90s and ’00s memories. Lately, I’ve noticed this nostalgia sneaking into my reading life too.

When it came to TV, online streaming was unheard of. If I missed an episode of Sailor Moon on Toonami, I was out of luck. I’d have to leave it up to fate and hope that it would air again someday on Cartoon Network, or I’d luck out and find a Sailor Moon movie to rent from Blockbuster.

Social media back then consisted of stressing over our Top 8 on MySpace and trying to figure out how to code theme songs onto our profile pages. For reference, mine was “Friends O’ Mine” by Bowling For Soup. Along with our Myspace woes, we were also debating what our AIM screen-names should be. I settled on SoccerPenguin243 for my first in a long series of questionable screen-names over the years.

There’s something fascinating about monster tales — something that keeps us humans coming back for more. And, let’s be honest: we’re the ones creating the monsters here. So what is it about monsters that’s so fascinating?

In the late 1990s, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote an essay called “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in the book Monster Theory: Reading Culture that kicked off the subfield of monster studies. In this essay, he posits that monsters are reflections of the cultural contexts from which they arise. So if we look at, for example, alien invasion novels from the 1950s, we can see the anxieties of the second Red Scare manifesting themselves in those oh-so-scary aliens.

Cohen also discusses how even though the monstrous might repulse us, it also attracts us so that we can’t look away. We love our monsters. We want them. And we want more of them.

If you’re interested in exploring the delightfully dark subfield of monster studies further, the recently-published The Monster Theory Reader is a smart and diverse collection of scholarly essays that’ll help you think about monsters and monstrosity in more ways than you would have dreamed of.

But if you’re looking for a good monster story, rather than theories about monsters, look no further. This list has everything from human-animal hybrids to folkloric creatures and beyond. It includes new monster novels and some which are a few years older.