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.

Pasolini’s pen was preternatural in its output. Collected by the publishing house Mondadori in their prestigious Meridiani series, his complete works in the original Italian (excluding private documents such as diaries, and his immense, largely unpublished, epistolary exchanges in various languages) fill ten densely printed volumes. The twenty thousand or so pages of this gargantuan oeuvre suggest that, in the course of his short adult life, Pasolini must have written thousands of words every day, without fail. 

Allusions to painting—and to the visual arts more broadly—appear across the full range of Pasolini’s writings, from journalistic essays to poetry and work for theater and film. The intended destination of the textual fragment below, which remained unpublished during Pasolini’s lifetime, remains uncertain. We know, however, that it was most likely penned in 1974. The “characterological” novelty of Caravaggio’s subjects, to which Pasolini alludes in passing, underscores some of the parallels between the two artists’ bodies of work: an eye for the unlikely sacredness of the coarse and squalid; a penchant for boorishness to the point of blasphemy; an attraction to louts and scoundrels of a certain type—the “rough trade,” of homosexual parlance.It is striking, for instance, that some of the nonprofessional actors that Pasolini found in the outskirts of Rome and placed in front of his camera bear an uncanny resemblance to the “new kinds of people” that Caravaggio “placed in front of his studio’s easel,” to quote from the essay presented here. Take Ettore Garofolo, who for a moment in Mamma Roma looks like a tableau vivant of Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a young waiter. Even the illness that ultimately kills that subproletarian character—so often read as a metaphor of the effects of late capitalism on Italy’s post-Fascist society—is born out of an art historical intuition that is articulated in this fragment on Caravaggio’s use of light. 

But it was equally an exquisite formal sense—a search after “new forms of realism”—that drew Pasolini to Caravaggio’s work, particularly the peculiar accord struck in his paintings between naturalism and stylization. Pasolini professed to “hate naturalism” and, with some exceptions, avoided the effects of Tenebrism in his cinema. It is, instead, the very artificiality of Caravaggio’s light—a light that belongs “to painting, not to reality”—which earns his admiration.

The Roberto Longhi mentioned below is Pasolini’s former teacher, an art historian at the forefront of Caravaggio studies. It was Longhi who resurrected the painter from a certain obscurity in the twenties, arguing for the consequence of his work to a wider European tradition from Rembrandt and Ribera to Courbet and Manet.

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?)