Genevieve Valentine
-
Joan DeJean's latest dive into French history starts with something simple — the appointment of a royal embroiderer. But then things get weird: inheritance fraud, elopements, double lives and more.
-
This collection of essays by novelist and scholar Joanna Russ was first published in 1983 — but it reads as if it might've come out last week. "Get angry; then get a reading list," says our critic.
-
Evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen's new book is a breezy (sometimes too breezy) account of the ways animals have adapted to city life, and the staggering impact humans have had on evolution.
-
Kendall R. Phillips' new look at early American horror movies is academic, sure — but its central arguments make for great reading about how shifting cultural currents shape what scares us on screen.
-
Sofia Samatar teams up with her brother Del, a tattoo artist, to create a new take on the fantastic bestiary. The result is a prose poem with jolts of autobiography, spiced with intricate drawings.
-
Your parents' favorite travel expert has made his name as a low-key, approachable, optimistic guy. But in his new book, he doesn't shy away from trouble and the ways travel makes you an outsider.
-
Most stage and screen versions of Frankenstein are based on a later edition of Mary Shelley's classic — this new reprint of her original text shows the story growing and changing with its author.
-
Christopher Frayling's new celebration of Frankenstein is half art book, half scholarly study, tracing the famous monster's path from page to stage to screen, just in time for his 200th birthday.
-
Two new books about unreal islands and yet-to-be-real planets have much to tell us about what human beings want to know when we look around at the world — life is uncertain, and our fears need maps.
-
Lindsey Fitzharris' new book about the horrors of Victorian medicine and the introduction of antisepsis is a vital, effective history — but perhaps you shouldn't read it with a full stomach.
-
Peter Manseau skillfully weaves together spirituality, technology and the legacy of the Civil War to tell the story of a "spirit photographer" on trial for claiming he could take pictures of ghosts.
-
Lizzie Collingham's new book takes 20 exemplary British meals, from plain stewed beef to an elaborate Christmas pudding, and uses them to illustrate the way food and empire are inextricably linked.