Book cover of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination

Book description

From sushi and karaoke to martial arts and technoware, the currency of made-in-Japan cultural goods has skyrocketed in the global marketplace during the past decade. The globalization of Japanese "cool" is led by youth products: video games, manga (comic books), anime (animation), and cute characters that have fostered kid crazes…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Millennial Monsters as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Who cannot love a serious but accessible book that obsesses about things like Pokémon, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Tamagotchi (those annoying and addictive “digital pets” that were a millennial fad)?

Anne Allison’s volume was a real eye-opener for me on the place of monsters in youth culture, as a form of play, and how monsters have been commercialized and globalized over the past half century. It is incredible that, in the early twenty-first century, American kids were more likely to embrace Pikachu and Godzilla than the archetypal monsters of Western culture like Dracula and Frankenstein. Allison helped me…

From William's list on The best books on why we love monsters.

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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