What’s that you say? There’s also an incredibly sick book of poems and drawings from Rose Metal Press? It’s a Halloween miracle!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two books that really examine monstrousness in interesting ways. I’m going to be writing more about this next week or the week after, but these interrogations of what makes a monster have really stuck with me. I know, big surprise for the creature feature guy<\/a>. These books had excellent extras, too. One’s delightfully annotated, you’ve got a scholar chaperoning you through the whole thing. The other has drawings from a tattoo artist. Super sick, both ways. I’m talking, of course, about Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales<\/em> edited by Jennifer Pullen and Monster Portraits<\/em> by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beastly: An Anthology of Shapeshifting Fairy Tales<\/em>, edited by Jennifer Pullen: <\/strong>like said, this is the first Clockwork Edition I\u2019ve read, and damn, I really really enjoyed it. Jennifer Pullen\u2019s introduction and annotations guide you through each text the way a fun Millennial college professor world. We begin with \u201cCupid and Psyche,\u201d the oldest known Beauty And The Beast-typebeat from the second century CE, and end with “Prince Bair\u00e2m and the Fairy Bride,” a Pakistani folktale with no known original author. In between, there is Hans Christian Andersen, Madame d\u2019Aulony, Oscar Wilde, and more. Before reading this anthology, I hadn\u2019t fully appreciated just how many Beauty and The Beast stories were out there. Nor the obvious metaphor for arranged marriage\/alliance marriage\/property marriage. You\u2019re a young woman whose parents say it\u2019s time for you to go live with this man. If you know anything about men, they\u2019re just as likely to kill you (quickly or slowly) as they are to be an equal partner in a long, fulfilling life. Look at the Pelicot case<\/a> from a few years ago (extreme content warning for maybe the most vile crime I\u2019ve ever heard of. Seriously, protect yourself before looking up the Pelicot case). This anthology has re-ignited my love of fairy tales. One of these years I am going to do a mostly fairy tale-themed reading list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monster Portraits<\/em> by Sofia Samatar and Del Samatar: <\/strong>goddamn this book is so sick. That\u2019s all I want to say about it, that it\u2019s super sick and you should read it, but you come to this blog for a touch more than that. Sofia is a poet and Del is a tattoo artist, and these prosey, narrative poems are accompanied by very original and tattoo-art-influenced black-and-white drawings of monsters. This is a Rose Metal Press book, WE ARE BENDING GENRES. There\u2019s this narrative of the Samatar siblings as sort of going into the field and studying monsters, but what does studying monstrousness reveal? Especially if you are the biracial children of immigrants? I don\u2019t wanna give the impression that The Real Monster Was Racist Humans All Along, though. There are more layers, a lot going on in this book, and it never strays too far from this fieldwork aspect, this studying. If you, like me, think JK Rowling oughter fix her heart or chuck herself off the cliffs of Dover? Then this book is your Fantastic Beasts<\/em> replacement. Bonus: this book isn\u2019t phoned in and half-assed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? Brendan put me on to The Comet Is Coming. My friends, the comet is coming. Listen to The Comet Is Coming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"two](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-20.png\")