Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Basic Witches | 2017 | Jess Zimmerman | Buy |
| 2 | Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology | 2021 | Jess Zimmerman | Buy |
Jess Zimmerman’s non-fiction spans feminist cultural criticism and humorous lifestyle writing. Her first book, Basic Witches (2017), co-written with Jaya Saxena, is a tongue-in-cheek guide that mixes witchcraft practices with practical advice on everything from powering up crystals to banishing bad dates.
Her second book, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology (2021), takes a more literary approach. It reexamines eleven female monsters from Greek mythology and makes the case that the traits these figures embody, anger, hunger, desire, and ambition, are not flaws but strengths that women have been taught to suppress. Roxane Gay described Zimmerman as “risking it all so that the rest of us can see the map and the shape of the world.”
Zimmerman’s essays have appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and Vice, and were noted in both Best American Essays 2016 and 2017. She served as editor-in-chief of Electric Literature and was a founding editor of Archipelago.