Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Kim Fu

#4330 of 8,085 books · #351 in Horror

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize (2022).

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century won the 26th Annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award, was shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize, named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2022, The Globe 100: The Best Books of 2022, CBC Books: The Best Canadian Fiction of 2022, and TIME Magazine's 10 Best Fiction Books of 2022, and was longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.