Day: 13 January 2010

39. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears

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Stephen Asma: On Monsters [ 19:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I first became aware of Stephen Asma‘s book on the fine Washington Post Book World podcast (which sadly is no more). The Post also chose the book as one of its top non-fiction titles of the year for 2009, calling it “a safari through the many manifestations of our idea of the monstrous”. Their reviewer went on: “I have seldom read a book that so satisfyingly achieves such an ambitious goal.” And indeed the book is much more than a mere freakish parade of monsters (though that is a part of its pleasure) – it is rather an investigation of the meaning of monsters. Why do all societies have their monsters? What do they help us cope with? How has the significance of monsters changed as societies have gone from polytheism to monotheism and on through the Enlightenment? And which of our current fears will our future monsters embody? Asma is clearly something of a polymath – not only did he produce many of the illustrations in the book himself, he also combines his academic …

Books of the Decade – Michael Bywater

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Michael Bywater is an author and broadcaster whose recent books include Lost Worlds (Granta, 2004), Big Babies (Granta, 2006), and – with Kathleen Burk – Is This Bottle Corked?: The Secret Life of Wine. He writes regularly for the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times and numerous other publications. He is a regular broadcaster for the BBC. Scarlett Thomas – The End of Mr Y (2007) The Noughties produced a series of fine and strange novels on the strange relationship between the living and the dead, starting with Will Self’s How The Dead Live (2000) and including Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005), The Brief History of the Dead (Kevin Brockmeier 2007). But the star of the show was, for me, Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2007), an astounding, hypnotic compendium of computer-game, urban fantasy, dreamscape and sheer magic, incorporating a discourse on homoeopathy, a meditation on Heidegger and Derrida, a love stronger than death, and the sexiest, stroppiest, most wilful and clever heroine of the last decade, her first-person narrator Ariel Manto. I …