Monsters

Genre

Art, Culture & Creative Life

Publisher

Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780525655114

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma is a work of criticism by the American writer Claire Dederer, published by Alfred A. Knopf in April 2023. Expanding a 2017 Paris Review essay, it examines how audiences reconcile admired art with the wrongdoing of its makers. It was a New York Times Notable Book of 2023.

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Claire Dederer has been asking that question since a viral 2017 essay, and Monsters expands it into a book that refuses the easy answers on offer from every side. Can you still love Woody Allen's films, Michael Jackson's music, Picasso's paintings, knowing what you know? Dederer declines both the purity of the boycott and the shrug of separating art from artist, sitting instead in the genuine discomfort of loving compromised things. She is funny, self-implicating and unafraid to turn the lens on her own appetites and failures. intendle recommends it as one of the most honest works of criticism in years - a book that thinks rather than scolds. A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and a best book of the year across many outlets, it treats its readers as adults capable of holding contradiction. Essential for anyone who has ever loved something they can't fully defend.