Description: The goal of Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture, edited by Jes Battis, is to analyze the ways in which young heroic protagonists are presented in popular literary and visual texts. Supernatural Youth is essential for educators who wo...
Brief description: Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. Other fiction includes the short story collections Secret Hours, ANTISOCIETIES, and Visiting Maze. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.
Review Quotes: To quote Tamora Pierce, the author of The Song of the Lioness and several other young adult novels, fantasy is a 'literature of empowerment.' This aphorism takes on new meaning in light of the many provocative observations put forth in Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture. Bringing together thirteen original essays that transport the reader from the outer edges of Terry Pratchett's Discworld to the hallowed halls of Hogwarts and beyond, this energetic collection will doubtless spark a reassessment of our most treasured cinematic, literary, and televisual texts (including Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea volumes, Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Books of Magic, and Joss Whedon's cult sensation Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But this book's greatest contribution is its thoroughgoing exploration of the ways in which an 'intangible, ethical magic' (to borrow the words of Jes Battis) at the heart of these and other less widely discussed texts (such as the TV series Hex and Sabrina the Teenage Witch) informs the construction of gender, sexuality, and adolescent identity among social outcasts. Like Pierce's allegorical tales involving cross-dressing and lesbianism, Supernatural Youth challenges us 'to see beyond the concrete universe and to envision other ways of living and alternative mindsets' --an invitation that can empower readers young and old alike. --David Scott Diffrient, Colorado State University