Contemporary Bestiaries for the Curious and Canny

Yokai Bestiary: How to Draw Eerie and Enchanting Japanese Ghouls and Monsters by Lance Red

Illustrator Lance Red has crafted a book that’s bestiary, mythology, and drawing how-to guide in his Yokai Bestiary. Yokai are figures from Japanese folklore–sometimes demons, other times spirits or other supernatural creatures. Red’s book introduces readers to 35 yokai, offering information on each one, alongside step-by-step instructions on how to draw them in a contemporary and cartoonish style. The how-to directions are easy to follow and offer instruction on various artistic techniques like shading and blocking.

Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times edited by Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani

Featuring 26 essays by different authors, one for each letter of the alphabet, Animalia is a surprisingly accessible critical collection. The animals catalogued here are explored in terms of their relationship to colonialism. As such, the images in this bestiary run the gamut from nature drawings to historical photographs and even political cartoons. Each entry ends with a list of suggestions for further reading, which gives readers who want to dive deeper some concrete direction. It’s a thoughtfully compiled and fascinating spin on the bestiary.

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is perhaps most recently known for her young adult book Impossible Creatures. Yet, Vanishing Treasures is a moving bestiary of over 20 entirely possible–albeit endangered–creatures living amongst us on this planet. Rundell’s writing blends facts with history and folklore, and the short essays will leave you with plenty to think about. Talya Baldwin’s beautiful illustrations bring the creatures in this tome to life. For the audiophiles out there, Lenny Henry’s narration of the audiobook is amazing.

A Bestiary by Lily Hoang

This is the least bestiary-like bestiary on this list. Perhaps a bestiary in name only, it’s a collection of 13 personal essays exploring Hoang’s identity as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Animals, both real and imagined, are sprinkled throughout the book. Despite the lack of illustrations or scientific explanations, this gives the entire memoir a bestiary-like feel (with dashes of fairy tale mixed in). Instead, the way Hoang structured the text encourages readers to link the many, often recurring, animal references to the brutally honest, raw stories she tells about her own life. The result is a compelling memoir that will stay with you long after reading it.

A Pre-ColumbianBestiary: Fantastic Creatures of Indigenous Latin America by Ilan Stavans

Chicano scholar Ilan Stavans’ bestiary of pre-Columbian creatures in Latin America is fascinating because it draws on everything from religious texts to fictional imaginings. It explores creatures that are significant to various Indigenous Latin American cultures, using both reality and fiction. The descriptions of each creature are relatively brief and accompanied by striking black-and-white etchings by Eko, making it a great coffee table book or quick reference guide.

The Modern Bestiary: A Curated Collection of Wondrous Wildlife by Joanna Bagniewska

Penned by a zoologist, The Modern Bestiary might be the most scientific of the books on this list. Jennifer N.R. Smith’s illustrations add a quirky feel that complements the book’s tone. If medieval bestiaries purported to offer moral instruction, Bagniewska’s bestiary encourages readers to set aside human moralizing and look at some of the most delightfully bizarre creatures in our midst. With creatures exhibiting behaviors humans widely consider unacceptable, such as orgies and cannibalism, this bestiary embraces the weirdness of 100 different species. Bagniewska writes in the book’s opening pages: “Animals are gross. And gory. And obscene.” While this isn’t a book for the kiddos, it’s a book that’ll make adult readers feel like a kid again as they learn unusual things about even more unusual creatures.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The first thing you will notice upon picking up World of Wonders is Fumi Mini Nakamura’s glorious artwork. It’s enough to make this book worth it all on its own. But then there’s Nezhukumatathil’s writing. These essays are more personal than an ordinary bestiary. Blending personal essay with scientific information, this is a form of nature writing that asks the reader to forge connections between the author’s experiences and the natural world. For instance, in “Axolotl,” she writes about her experiences smiling through racism alongside facts about axolotls’ ability to regenerate limbs. This magic happens when a poet writes a bestiary, and it’s truly remarkable.

Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meanings by Natalie Lawrence

Enchanted Creatures is as much a meditation on the monstrous as it is a bestiary. Lawrence posits that for something to be monstrous, it “has to go beyond the boundaries of familiar nature, to confound our expectations.” From this foundation, each of the book’s eight chapters begins with the tale of a monster–think dragons, leviathans, minotaurs–before delving into the history of that monster’s inception, the primal human fear it taps into, and what it tells us about humanity past and present.

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