March 26, 2025

Book tour part 1, a forest of free excerpts and podcasts, and an audiobook!

Welcome back folks, and hallo new subscribers!

This newsletter is a bit late: the time and bandwidth challenges of a book tour are real. But I’m excited today to share a bumper issue with:

• tidbits from the road

• reviews of HUMANS

• published interviews

• new podcast episodes

• FREE excerpts from HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY

• Audio book news and ordering discounts

HUMANS road trip!

The tour started off in Washington DC at the fabled Politics & Prose bookstore on March 4. Since the UK pub date was a month after the US pub date, this was the first time that I saw my book on the shelves! It was fun to start in a place I used to live, and to see familiar faces in the audience. Every author’s secret fear is that they’ll do an event and NOBODY will turn up. I’m now 3.5 weeks into the tour. So far so good… 

From DC I headed to California for just over a week. The first full day, in Pasadena, turned out to be fairly typical over the past few weeks:

6am radio interview for a BBC radio programme (hallo, time zones!);

8:30am pickup from my hotel to head to the Huntington Library, the day’s main venue;

10-11:30am public talk and q and a;

11:45am-1pm collections-based workshop, where attendees could view a bunch of monster-related books that I’d picked out in conversation with Prof. Daniela Bleichmar of USC and history of science curator Dr. Joel Klein, and hear us talking about them;

1-2pm lunch with attendees;

2-3:15-ish brainstorming session with Dr. Megan Kate Nelson in preparation for our evening event;

5pm fun: early dinner with friends old and new before the event;

7-8:30pm-ish book conversation with Megan Kate Nelson about HUMANS, followed by book signing;

8:30pm-10pm post-talk hangout with a friend.

Phew! A lot. But other days have been lighter. There’s the occasional “empty” day when I’m neither performing live, nor performing on Zoom, nor travelling.

After the Pasadena sprint-marathon I headed to Stanford University for 3.5 days. this was more leisurely: a podcast interview, an in-person interview, a lunch with grad students, the public talk, and some lovely meals with friends. I was delighted that the History department provided a bunch of copies of HUMANS to grad students who were coming to the talk. Here’s hoping it inspires them to let out their inner Muppet, too.

From Pasadena I made a quick trip to UC Santa Cruz, where I was the guest of the Center of Monster Studies. (Yes! That’s a thing!) Before my talk I was able to stroll from my hotel to the beach five minutes away, and see sea lions and the famed boardwalk.

The campus itself was idyllic: sea views, forests… I’m amazed that the room was packed. (Why weren’t they all gazing at the scenery instead of indoors at a talk?)

The final California stop was UC Berkeley. While I was in town I visited the mother ship: the University of California Press offices in Oakland!

From here I headed to Boston for the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting - but that’s a story for next time.

Next on tour

Thursday 27 March, Amherst Books, Amherst, MA. [update: I’m pressing SEND now before getting off the train in two minutes!]

Monday March 31, 6pm, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

For April events in NYC, Philadelphia, and London - some in-person, some hybrid - and for the free YouTube event hosted by the Peculiar Book Club - visit my events page here.

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Published interviews

In Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s Modern Medieval newsletter I wrote about the making of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, how I made the transition in scope and tone from academic writing to writing for a general audience, and my hopes for what readers will take away from the book.

“There are no monsters, but all of them are real.” The literary magazine Unseen Histories asked me about this line. We also discussed ancient monsters, the monster inflection-point of 1492 and Columbus’s first voyage to what became known as the Americas, the character of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a mysterious monster scrapbook, and more.

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Podcast episodes

I spoke with Jason Herbert about one of my favourite movies, Monsters, Inc., on the podcast Historians At The Movies. If you need a smart, funny, feel-good movie that demonstrates, in cartoon form, that monster-making is a form of storytelling that societies undertake together, this is it! 

With Ann Foster on the Vulgar History podcast I chatted about a science fiction novel from….the seventeenth century! Lady Mary Cavendish preferred bears. To learn more, try this episode.

Natalie Grueninger and I discussed monsters and monster-making in the sixteenth century on the Talking Tudors podcast.

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Free excerpts from HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY

If you’d like to sample HUMANS or share samples with folks who might enjoy the book, an excerpt on the boundary between human and animal in Renaissance Europe appeared in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

An excerpt on how the way we think about robots and AI is re-configuring how we define what we mean by human appeared in Literary Hub.

For more interviews and book excerpts, please check out my website here.

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The audiobook and other purchasing option updates

The audiobook of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, read by the wonderful Christina Delaine, is now available to order! It comes out on May 13 - just in time for late spring summer road trips if you’re in northern climes, or in time for curling up under blankets if it’s going to turn cold where you are.

Did you know that Bookshop.org also does ebooks? HUMANS: A MONSTROUS history is there in hardback and ebook.

And if you attended the Renaissance Society of America or Shakespeare Association of America annual meetings last weekend, you can buy HUMANS for just $17.97 (retail price $29.95) using the Scholar’s Choice ordering form! If you didn’t pick up a form or lost it, you can email information@scholarschoice.com to order.

You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,

BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),

and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).