There are plenty of stories about girls who fall in love with monsters, but what about monster girls themselves? Perhaps not surprisingly, YA fiction is also a great place to find girls who are monstrous in one way or another. Gothic fiction has often used monsters as a metaphor for puberty or sexual awakening — think of Lucy’s transformation into a vampire in Dracula, or Carmilla’s titular character threatening and intriguing the heroine. Many YA supernatural stories have continued this Gothic tradition, creating monster girl heroines who grapple with changes in their lives or bodies, or who show their claws in order to fight back against something wrong in society. Some YA contemporary stories also focus on girls who could be viewed as monsters, metaphorically speaking, portrayed as antiheroines or outright villains who harm others.

In a world where female characters still get criticised for not being “likeable enough,” and where teenage girls are pressured to conform to models of femininity, monster girls in YA fill an interesting niche that explores what happens when girls break out of the boundaries imposed on them by patriarchy and other repressive social systems, and how frightening this can be to people who want to keep girls in this predefined place. Unlike monstrous boys, monster girls in YA are rarely set up as love interests — instead, their roles are complex and often unsettling. Monster girls make for fascinating, nuanced reads because of the way they challenge our notion of what a heroine is “supposed” to be like. Here are some of the most interesting monster girls in YA.

Note to readers: This article contains a major spoiler for The Midnight Game. Read on at your own discretion.

Have you ever thought there should be a word for the sci-fi genre involving prehistoric technology developments? Well, there is! It’s called “stonepunk.” Maybe an example springs to mind, maybe not. Either way, let’s learn about the sub-genre together, and then I’ll give you a few recommendations from the genre to get you started.

I worked with young children long before my first year teaching in 2007. I have three degrees that qualify me to educate kids. Interacting with young people has been my greatest skill for as long as I’ve been a person. My biggest takeaway over the last, oh, 30 years? Kids will never fail to surprise me. It’s been proven to me over and over that kids know more, feel more, and deserve more than adults ever give them credit for.

My latest lesson in this has been around the palpable relief felt by my elementary students when I worked to make my school library more queer-friendly. This process included no fanfare. I had already been adding picture books that challenged gender norms and middle grade titles with queer characters and storylines for as long as I had been developing the collection. But as I was working to add racial and physical diversity into my library posters and signage, I knew I wanted to branch out to make sure everyone felt welcome.

The first noticeable shift was when I decorated my door with a “This Classroom is for Everyone” sticker from the Etsy artist MegEmikoArt. The sticker is decorated with pride flags and my students buzzed as they came into Media. Soon after, I bought the “Libraries are for everyone” shirt in the same design by the same artist. A 5th grader who didn’t usually stop to chat pointed to one of the flags on my shirt, grinned, and said “That one’s me.” I was wonderfully, pleasantly floored.

I thought I was adding more queer flags, using gender-neutral terms, and featuring books with queer characters to help them prepare for the real world. I thought my students should be exposed to these things in case they met queer people or to make them more comfortable with queer family structures. This was a condescending way for me to think about my students. Thank god the kids are smarter than me.

What actually happened was that my students thanked me. There was gratitude, excitement, and relief. My students already knew how to identify more specific pride flags than I did. They already knew that gender and sexuality are spectrums and each person knows what feels right to them. I had students with whom I had no previous relationship sharing their pronouns. Our STEM building materials were used to build and label different pride flags. Requests were made for the LGBTQ book section; the books had always been there. The kids just needed affirmation that it was safe to ask for them. My students did not need exposure. They needed a safe space.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 13 years since Finn, Jake, Bubblegum Princess, and the rest of the Adventure Time crew came into our homes to delight us with their mathematical dealies. Even though the show ended way back in 2018, its offbeat characters and bizarro world still have a place in fans’ hearts. If you’re missing your AT faves, these books and comics for fans of Adventure Time might just fill the void.

Now, before you ask: no, the Adventure Time comics and graphic novels themselves are not on this list. In the interest of sharing some off-the-beaten-path recommendations, I’m not including them here. With that being said, you should absolutely check them out if you haven’t already.

It’s difficult to replicate the spirit of Adventure Time. Anything can happen in the Land of Ooo. There are always new civilizations to meet, treasures to discover, and places to explore.

It’s hard to maintain a sort of internal logic when every corner of your invented world is wildly different from the last. But in literature, with the exception of a scant few niche sub-genres, that logic is critical for readers to be able to understand and access your work.

These books and comics for fans of Adventure Time won’t bring the show back, but they might just fill that Jake-and-Finn-sized hole in your heart.

I read (and write) a lot of reviews, and while I sometimes do let them guide me toward or away from books, I find that reading reviews is most interesting, useful, and insightful not before I’ve read a book, but afterwards. In fact, I often turn to reviews soon after I finish a book. It’s one of my favorite reading rituals. I like to let my own thoughts and feelings about a book settle, and then I like to see what other folks are saying about it. Inevitably, reading these reviews, whether they’re positive, negative, or critical, deepens my understanding of the book I just read.

There are so many reasons why reviews are better after you’ve read the book. There’s the obvious fact that sometimes it’s hard to write a good review without spoilers. I personally do not care about spoilers. Ninety-eight percent of the time, knowing what happens does not decrease my enjoyment of a book, and often it increases my enjoyment. But I know lots of people do not feel this way, and so I try to avoid major spoilers when writing reviews. Of course, this means that sometimes I can’t write about the heart of a book, and it’s frustrating. So I’ve started writing more reviews with a different mindset: When I review a book, I’m responding to and reflecting on a piece of art. I’m not trying to convince anyone to read it (or not read it).

This brings me to the number one reason that I think it’s better for everyone when we all read reviews after we’ve read the books. Reviews are not objective. There is no such thing as an objective review. I don’t know why this is a thing that people think exists. It does not exist. You cannot write an objective review, and you shouldn’t! The point of reviewing isn’t to judge a work of art against some invisible, arbitrary standard. The point of reviewing is to engage with art. Critical reviews, pithy negative reviews, glowing reviews, thoughtful reviews, dishy reviews — it’s all part of the conversation. It’s all worthwhile, and it’s all important.

But here’s the thing: because reviews are never objective, they are actually not that good (on their own) at helping you decide whether or not to read a book. Here, I’ll give you an example. Earlier this year, I read Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I did not like it at all. I could see what Lacey was doing, and she did it very well, but I couldn’t make myself care about it. I did not want to be in the world she made. I’ve since read dozens of glowing reviews of it on Bookstagram. I do not disagree with any of them — they point out many of the things I admired in the novel. If I hadn’t already read it, I’d be tempted to, based on some of these reviews. You see the problem, right? None of these reviewers are lying! They’re writing about their experience of the book, which was the opposite of my experience. A glowing review does not mean a book is good. A scathing review does not mean a book is bad. A review is response to a piece of art. Unless you know the reviewer well, and know that you have similar taste, it’s impossible to tell from a review whether you’ll have the same response or not.

I’ve quite enjoyed reading reviews of Biography of X. Some of them have made me think about it in different ways. Some of them have reminded me exactly why I hated it, and I feel validated. I read a book, I didn’t like it, and now I’m interested in the conversation people are having about it. The conversation is the main event. I can learn from and enjoy the conversation even though I didn’t like the book. And this goes for pretty much all books — books I’ve loved, books I’ve felt indifferent to, books I’ve hated.

In these pages, written in 2021, I seem to have been looking back at earlier notes and journals. The story of Pierre—a French shepherd—is a project imagined decades ago that I still have not given up on. My “theories” are also still interesting to me: for instance, that maybe certain people are more inclined to violence when there is less sensuality of other kinds in their lives.

Lydia Davis’s story collection Our Strangers will be published in fall 2023 by Bookshop Editions. Selections from her 1996 journals appear in the Review‘s new Summer issue, no. 244.

There’s a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen movies—Dirty Dancing, Say Anything, One Crazy Summer—you never know when you’ll see some skin. And so it goes in our new Summer issue. In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “Kings,” the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations:

                                     … You never knew
whether it would be strip or not, so you always
considered wearing layers. It was summer.
Sometimes you’d get pretty naked
but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off
one sock at a time.

Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer fling? Maybe that’s just how objects appear in the rearview mirror; even the most operatic affairs can seem a little comical in retrospect. In his poem “Armed Cavalier,” Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse kind of summer romance, when two lovers lock themselves away “for a whole weekend / and not eat or drink.” I love the wry look he casts over his shoulder at the end of these lines:

Stars, slow traffic,

Three years ago, I biked into a curb and fell on my head. When I got up, I couldn’t remember where I was, so I called an ambulance, which drove me to the nearest hospital, which was apparently one block away. The emergency room doctors told me there was nothing they could do. My eye was swollen, but my face seemed otherwise normal, and they wouldn’t know if anything was wrong with my brain unless they ran a CAT scan, which would expose me to toxic radiation. I asked if there were any nontoxic tests they could run for free. They offered to run a blood panel, which would let me know if I had any STIs. I let them bind my forearm, which had nothing to do with my head.

The next day, the doctor sent a message through the hospital’s online portal. My tests all came back negative, but they had also run a nutrient panel, and I was deficient in B12. I started googling. “Fell off bike low B12?” Everything that came up was random; I might as well have strung together any other combination of five words. I wanted to google more, but the doctor had told me that the internet was bad for my concussion. So I forgot about my deficiency and tried hard to make my body do nothing, which was the only way for it to heal.

Things got better. I started to feel normal, and eventually I was allowed to google as much as I wanted. Years went by. And then one day at a café, I met a man—a comedian—who told me horror stories about his life as a former vegan. His hair had fallen out, he was exhausted, his mood was always sour, and it was all because of vitamins: he could never get enough of them. While he complained, I felt my hairline receding; I was a vegan, too. And when I thought about it, really thought about it, my personality was on the decline. I was always struggling to make my days have meaning, and I wore my meaninglessness like a divine premonition. (“I have a feeling,” I texted a friend, “that something bad, really bad, is going to happen.”) I remembered the emergency room doctor’s diagnosis and felt the empty place inside of me where all the B12 supplements should have been, leeching into my bloodstream.

I tried to make a doctor’s appointment, but I had moved to California, and my insurance only covered care in New York. My body was on the West Coast, but all the tools I had for reading it were on the East. I told my father I was coming home to visit him, and when I arrived, asked him to drop me off at urgent care.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “Ex-Stewardess” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience—the start of it—is wordless and meditative.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

On July 11, 1903, a long narrative poem called “The Miner’s Song” by Karl P. Effield appeared in the Natal Mercury, a weekly newspaper in Durban, South Africa. Effield—who claimed to be from Boston—was actually none other than the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, then a high school student in Durban. This was the first of Pessoa’s English-language fictitious authors to appear in print—the beginning of Pessoa’s unusual mode of self-othering. The adoption of different personae allowed him to go beyond a nom de plume, and take on unpopular, controversial, and even extreme points of view in both his poetry and prose.

While in South Africa, where Pessoa lived between 1896 and 1905, he sent another work to the Natal Mercury under the name of Charles Robert Anon, attempting without success to publish three political sonnets about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Pessoa’s early fictitious authors wrote in English, French, and Portuguese—the three languages he continued to use until he died, at age forty-seven. These first invented writers, which he would go on to call “heteronyms,” composed loose texts mostly in the form of first drafts; but others, like Bernardo Soares (whom Pessoa created around 1920) or the major heteronyms (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis in 1914), produced a very solid body of work. By the time Pessoa was twenty-six years old, he had already invented a hundred literary personae.

Alberto Caeiro was the central fictitious figure of Pessoa’s literary universe. Born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, Caeiro died of tuberculosis in 1915. Pessoa said that Caeiro poetically arrived in his life on March 8, 1914—which in a famous letter to the Portuguese literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro he described as a “triumphal day.” The poet and novelist Mário de Sá-Carneiro was one of Pessoa’s closest friends in Lisbon, and Caeiro (perhaps a pun on Sá-Carneiro’s name) seems to have come into being as a joke: “I thought I would play a trick on Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” wrote Pessoa in the same letter. Caeiro’s “death” seems to have been influenced, in retrospect, by Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in Paris on April 26, 1916. As Pessoa wrote in the review Athena in 1924, “Those whom the gods love die young.” By that time, he had produced the body of poems for which Caeiro would be remembered—The Keeper of Sheep.

Counterpath Press’s series of now thirteen computer-generated books, Using Electricity, offers a refreshing alternative to the fantasia of terror and wonder that we’ve all been subjected to since the public release of ChatGPT. The books in this series present us with wide-ranging explorations into the potential interplay between human language and code. Although code-based work can be dauntingly hermetic to the noncoder, all computationally generated or mediated writing is the result of two fundamental decisions that remain in the hands of the human author: defining the source text(s) (the data) and choosing the processes (the algorithms or procedures) that operate on them. A text generator like ChatGPT uses brute force on both sides—enormous amounts of text vacuumed from the internet are run through energy-intensive pattern-finding algorithms—to create coherent, normative sentences with an equivocal but authoritative tone. The works in Using Electricity harness data and code to push language into more playful and revealing imaginative territory.

Many of Using Electricity’s authors mobilize computational processes to supercharge formal constraints, producing texts that incessantly iterate through variations and permutations. In The Truelist, Nick Montfort, the series editor, runs a short Python script to generate pages of four-line stanzas comprising invented compound words. “Now they saw the lovelight, / the blurbird, / the bluewoman facing the horse, / the fireweed.” The poem is a relentless loop—repeating this same structure as it churns through as many word combinations as it can find. Rafael Pérez y Pérez’s Mexica uses a pared-down, culturally specific vocabulary and a complex algorithm to generate short fairy tale–like stories. One begins, “The princess woke up while the songs of the birds covered the sky.” The skeletal story structure swaps different characters and actions as the variations play out. It’s like watching a multiversal performance of the same puppet show.

I find that often I am not reading these works for meaning as much as for pattern, which is at the heart of how computation operates. Allison Parrish’s fantastic Articulations brings us frighteningly deep into the core of computational pattern searching. Drawing from a corpus of over two million lines of poetry from the Project Gutenberg database, she takes us on a random walk through “vector space.” Put simply, this is the mathematical space in which computers plot similarities between different aspects of language—the sound, the syntax, whatever the programmer chooses. The result is a dizzying megacollage/cluster-mash-up of English poetry in which obsessive and surprising strings constantly emerge—a vast linguistic hall of mirrors. “In little lights, nice little nut. In a little sight. In a little sight, in a little sight, a right little, tight little island. A light. A light. A light. A light. A light.”

Many of these works are indebted to the wider traditions of procedural, concrete, conceptual, and erasure poetry, while making use of code’s unique possibilities for play, chance, variation, and repetition. Stephanie Strickland’s Ringing the Changes draws its mathematical ordering process from a centuries-old practice of English bell ringing. In Experiment 116, Rena Mosteirin plays a game of translation telephone by running Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” through multiple languages in Google Translate and back into English.

On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years—a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand. It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she “walked out from Lewes.” There were “men mending the wall & roof” of the house, and Will, the gardener, had “dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.” Finally, “bees in attic chimney.”

It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. First, she notes the weather, and her walk—to the post, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the number of mushrooms she finds—“almost a record find,” or “enough for a dish”—and of the insects she has seen: “3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung.” She notices butterflies in particular: painted ladies, clouded yellows, fritillaries, blues. She is blasé in her records of nature’s more gruesome sights—“the spine & red legs of a bird, just devoured by a hawk,” or a “chicken in a parcel, found dead in the nettles, head wrung off.” There is human violence, too. From the tops of the Downs, she listens to the guns as they sound from France, and watches German prisoners at work in the fields, who use “a great brown jug for their tea.” Home again, and she reports any visitors, or whether she has done gardening or reading or sewing. Lastly, she makes a note about rationing, taking stock of the larder: “eggs 2/9 doz. From Mrs Attfield,” or “sausages here come in.”

Though Woolf, then thirty-five, shared the lease of Asheham with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (who went there for weekend parties), for her, the house had always been a place for convalescence. Following her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she entered a long tunnel of illness—a series of breakdowns during which she refused to eat, talked wildly, and attempted suicide. She spent long periods at a nursing home in Twickenham before being brought to Asheham with a nurse to recover. At the house, Leonard presided over a strict routine, in which Virginia was permitted to write letters—“only to the end of the page, Mrs Woolf,” as she reported to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies—and to take short walks “in a kind of nightgown.” She had been too ill to pay much attention to the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, or to take notice of the war. “Its very like living at the bottom of the sea being here,” she wrote to a friend in early 1914, as Bloomsbury scattered. “One sometimes hears rumours of what is going on overhead.”

In the writing about Woolf’s life, the wartime summers at Asheham tend to be disregarded. They are quickly overtaken by her time in London, the emergence of the Hogarth Press, and the radical new direction she took in her work, when her first novels—awkward set-pieces of Edwardian realism—would give way to the experimentalism of Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. And yet during these summers, Woolf was at a threshold in her life and work. Her small diary is the most detailed account we have of her days during the summers of 1917 and 1918, when she was walking, reading, recovering, looking. It is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling. Unpacking each entry, we can see the richness of her daily life, the quiet repetition of her activities and pleasures. There is no shortage of drama: a puncture to her bicycle, a biting dog, the question of whether there will be enough sugar for jam. She rarely uses the unruly “I,” although occasionally we glimpse her, planting a bulb or leaving her mackintosh in a hedge. Mostly she records things she can see or hear or touch. Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.

Do cups have souls? If you look at Margot Bergman’s portfolio in our Summer issue, you might be tempted to say yes: the cups she has painted, from various vantage points and in bright colors, seem filled with life. Bergman, who was born in 1934, has been painting for nearly her whole life. She is best known for her series Other Reveries, which features collaborative portraits painted over artworks she has saved from flea markets and thrift stores. Each painting is layered with decisive, bold paint strokes, revealing a face latent with layers of emotions. They are at once beautiful, frightening, humorous, and welcoming. Who knew that cups could contain similarly human emotion? We talked about the joys of painting, the female form, and of course, what drew her to cups in the first place.

—Na Kim 

INTERVIEWER

Much of your work revolves around faces, and especially female figures. When did start painting these?

It’s about the middle of the year — and the middle of Pride Month — and Esquire has blessed us with a roundup of 20 of the best queer books out this year so far. In this list, you’ll find trans memoirs, illuminating nonfiction, poetry, and a variety of genres written by well-known authors as well as exciting new ones to know.

So, here are the 20 best LGBTQ+ books so far this year to pick up between Pride events.

Cormac McCarthy’s work means a lot to me, though when I try to explain exactly what, I find myself unusually stymied; my affinity for him doesn’t make all that much sense to me. What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me. (I have a curious memory of reading The Road over my mom’s shoulder when I must have been about ten.) I have a passage from All The Pretty Horses saved on my desktop, which I have revisited often and send around now and again, and which I cannot quote in full here but which ends:

The water was black and warm and he turned in the lake and spread his arms in the water and the water was so dark and so silky and he watched across the still black surface to where she stood on the shore with the horse and he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and walked into the water.

She paused midway to look back. Standing there trembling in the water and not from the cold for there was none. Do not speak to her. Do not call. When she reached him he held out his hand and she took it. She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold. Her black hair floating on the water about her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him. Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal. Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch. Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said.

Earlier this year, the Review commissioned the artist Jameson Green to paint a series of writers’ portraits for our new Summer issue—an idea Green came up with after looking through our archives and being particularly intrigued by a portfolio of Picasso’s drawings published in 1987. What he gave us is a delightful collection of what he calls “head studies,” renderings of famous writers from our archive—some recognizable, some less so—that capture, loosely, something of each subject’s essence. And, like much of Green’s other work, Writers borrows from various art historical styles—you’ll find, for instance, a Picasso-esque Percival Everett (or is it Edgar Allan Poe?) and Shirley Hazzard in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. Over the phone, we talked about his childhood obsession with cartoons and about the special attention portraits require, and I tried to guess who was who.

INTERVIEWER

Do you consider yourself a portraitist?