We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Interested in mythical monsters? Check out this reference volume from 1886, newly available in glorious totality on the interwebs.

In Mythical Monsters, author Charles Gould argues that “many of the so-called mythical animals, which throughout long ages and in all nations have been fertile subjects of fact and fiction,” are actually creatures that “really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time.”

Those damn mists, always obscuring the truth. At any rate, Gould sets the record straight with hi informative chapters on such phenomena as dragons, unicorns, sea serpents and the Chinese Phoenix. Old-school illustrations provide visuals for the monsters, and digressions into Peruvian Indian tribes and electric telegrams supply entertainment for those with woefully low attention spans.

Haruki Murakami is perhaps the most well-known Japanese author in the West, revered for novels like Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. His informal, subdued musings about life in an alienating globalized society are accented by a unique flair for magical realism– expertly weaving together ruminations on pop songs and healthy living with understated odes to human loneliness and casual asides about telepathic cats, supernaturally irresistible earlobes, and impossibly insidious corporate conspiracies.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a beautiful, but less popular novel of Murakami’s– perhaps because it amplifies the dualistic nature of his work, taking his pension for juxtaposing fantasy and reality to its logical extreme. Telling two separate but linked stories through alternating chapters, the author switches between the mundane, scientific world of data processing and a chimerical universe with a surplus of unicorns. While the jarring contrast can be off-putting for those unfamiliar with Murakami’s style, Hard-Boiled Wonderland just takes a little patience to reveal a complex, grown-up version of themes familiar from childhood fables. Forging a vivid fantasy on a foundation of the real world’s emotional complexity, Murakami skilfully addresses the significance of dreams and abstraction in our banal, everyday lives under late capitalism.

Dapper seafaring gents, mermen, centaurs, soldiers and saints: these are the anachronistic subjects of Michael C. Hsiung’s curious doodles. Idiosyncratically mixing erudite references to obscure folklore with deadpan humor and unexpected romance, Hsiung’s treatment of epic olde thyme mythology is as sarcastic as it is tender. Fond of accenting his illustrations with long-winded titles like, “A scene in which the street performer with six fingers may or may not need the passerbyer’s help to untangle himself,” and “Whereupon uncertain events befell, the baby angora unicorn mourns the man with the broken neck,” Hsiung provides teasingly brief glimpses through his work to the vast fantasy world that seems to have taken root within his imagination, revealing itself one rad picture at a time.

Check out Hsiung’s latest drawing, “On the levitation of the boy named Peter,” which the artist has generously made available as a free PDF for recession-battered print collectors.