Staff Picks: Nerds, Necromancers, and New Wave Poetry

From the cover of American Nerd.

In , Benjamin Nugent weaves a web of surprising cultural connections—from Mary Shelley’s , to nativism, to the use and abuse of Morse code—to explain the advent of the nerd in the late twentieth century. As the subtitle suggests, Nugent also reports firsthand on the connections that hold nerds together: “It was no coincidence, I think, that we generally came to D&D from home lives that tended toward the unpredictable and confounding … In the fantasies we made together, you weren’t always king, but you could always point to him.” Ten years after it was first published, remains absorbing, touching, entertaining and, to this reader, enlightening even at its most offhand (e.g., “A pretty good definition of sci-fi … is fiction that focuses exclusively on monumental. —