sometimes, you need happy endings

ariel isabel | 24 | he/they | USA | fantasy and sci-fi enthusiast and sometimes scholar | mostly liveblogging books and always reading like five at once

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

[evegoldenwoods]

For my own future reference, and for anyone else who wants it, a list of authors mentioned in the notes. (I cannot promise this is comprehensive, there are a lot of reblogs and I might have missed some.) I've included a link for each author, where possible I've tried to find one that leads you to their books, prioritising own websites/publishers, falling back on wikipedia otherwise.

If you find any mistakes in the links let me know and I'll edit. This post will be in two parts, because I literally broke tumblr with how many authors there were. I think it's about a hundred and fifty.

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé - speculative fiction

Marguerite Abouet - graphic novels

Elizabeth Acevedo - fiction, poetry

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - fiction

Tomi Adeyemi - young adult fantasy

K Ancrum - speculative contemporary young adult

Lily Anderson - fiction

Ashley Antoinette - fiction

Ama Ata Aidoo - poetry, fiction, plays

Kemi Ashing Giwa - speculative fiction

Kalynn Bayron - young adult, fantasy

Malorie Blackman - childrens' books, young adult

Natasha Bowen - fantasy

Gwendolyn Brooks - poetry

Natasha Brown - fiction

NoViolet Bulawayo - fiction

Constance Burris - speculative fiction

CL Clark - fantasy, speculative fiction

Wahida Clark - urban fiction

Lucille Clifton - poetry, fiction

Alyssa Cole - romance, thrillers, graphic novels

Kamilah Cole - fiction

Claire Coleman - fiction, essays, poetry

Maryse Condé - fiction, non-fiction, plays

Emma Dabiri - non-fiction

Edwidge Danticat - fiction

Angela Davis - philosophy

Carolina Maria De Jesus - memoir

Hayley Dennings - fiction

Tracy Deonn - fiction

Nicky Drayden - speculative fiction

Tananarive Due - horror, comics

Camille Dungy - memoir, poetry

Esi Edugyan - fiction

Zetta Elliot - childrens' books, teen fiction, adult fiction

Bernardine Evaristo - fiction

Conceição Evaristo - fiction, non-fiction

Eve Ewing - poetry, fiction, non-fiction, comics

Radna Fabias - poetry

Namina Forna - young adult fantasy

Latoya Ruby Frazier - non-fiction

Stella Gaitano - fiction

Camryn Garrett - fiction, middle grade

Roxane Gay - fiction, non-fiction, comics

Nicole Glover - fantasy, speculative fiction

Nikki Giovanni - poetry, essays

Jewelle Gomez - fiction, plays

Annette Gordon-Reed - non-fiction (history)

Pumla Dineo Gqola - non-fiction

Deanna Grey - romance

Yaa Gyasi - fiction

Andrea Hairston - fiction

Lorraine Hansberry - plays

Saidiya Hartman - non-fiction, theory

Alexis Henderson - dark speculative fiction

Adriana Herrera - romance

Talia Hibbert - romance

bell hooks - fiction, non-fiction, poetry

Pauline Hopkins - fiction, non-fiction, plays

Nalo Hopkinson - speculative fiction

Jordan Ifueko - comics, fantasy, young adult

Samantha Irby - non-fiction

Justina Ireland - science fiction, fantasy, comics

Meka James - contemporary and erotic romance

Tiffany D Jackson - young adult

Beverly Jenkins - romance

Alaya Dawn Johnson - speculative fiction

Micaiah Johnson - science fiction

Mariame Kaba - non-fiction

Petals Kalulé - fiction, poetry [Petals is noted as using she/they, I'm not 100% sure of their gender identity and past a certain point it feels weird to investigate too much]

Mikki Kendall - fiction, non-fiction

Jamaica Kincaid - fiction, non-fiction

Zaire Krieger - poetry

Nella Larsen - fiction

Karmen Lee - romance

Kirsten R. Lee - young adult

Margot Lee Shetterly - non-fiction

Audre Lourde - poetry, non-fiction

[evegoldenwoods]

And here's part two:

Terry Macmillen - fiction

Robin Maynard - non-fiction

Amber Mcbride - poetry, young adult

Janet Mock - non-fiction, screenwriting

Brittney Moris - comics, young adult, fantasy

Bethany C Morrow - fiction, science fiction, young adult

Leila Mottley - fiction, poetry

Beatriz Nascimento - non-fiction

Leticia Nascimento - I think non-fiction primarily

Gloria Naylor - fiction

Zora Neale Hurston - fiction, non-fiction

Grace Nichols - poetry

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu - fiction

Trifonia Melibea Obono - fiction

Shirlene Obuobi - comics, fiction

Nnendi Okorafor - science fiction

Melatu Uche Okorie - fiction

Chinelo Okparanta - fiction

Helen Oyeyemi - fiction

Nell Painter - non-fiction

Morgan Parker - poetry, non-fiction

Nikki Payne - romance

Koleka Putuma - plays, poetry

Claudia Rankine - poetry, plays, non-fiction

Sarah Raughley - young adult

Dia Reeves - fantasy, horror, science fiction

Kiley Reid - fiction

Stacy Reid - romance

Djamila Ribero - philosophy

Legacy Russell - fiction, non-fiction, poetry

Layla F. Saad - non-fiction

Sofia Samatar - fiction, non-fiction

Liselle Sambury - fantasy

Analeigh Sbrana - romance, fantasy

Namwali Serpell - fiction

Ntozake Shange - plays, poetry

Christina Sharpe - non-fiction

Nisi Shawl - fiction, alternate history

Jamison Shea - dark fantasy/horror

Patricia Smith - poet

Tracy K Smith - poet

Zadie Smith - fiction

Sister Souljah - fiction

Kiki Swinson - fiction

Mildred D Taylor - young adult/children's lit

Katerina Teaiwa - non-fiction

Teresia Teaiwa - poetry

Angie Thomas - young adult, middle grade

Leah Thomas - non-fiction

Spike Trotman - comics

Tloto Tsamaase - science fiction

Nikki Turner - urban fiction

Maxine Tynes - poetry

Ngozi Ukazu - comics

Shola von Reinhold - fiction

Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ - fiction

Jasmine Walls - graphic novels

Alice Walker - fiction, non-fiction, poetry

Jesmyn Ward - fiction

Monica West - fiction

Phyllis Wheatley-Peters - poetry

Rita Williams-Garcia - young adult, middle grade

Stephanie Williams - comics, non-fiction

Tia Williams - fiction, romance

Raquel Willis - non-fiction

Jamila Woods - poetry

Jacqueline Woodson - childrens' books, young adult, fiction, poetry

Alexis Wright - fiction, non-fiction

Zane - erotic fiction

Fiona Zedde - fiction

[bespectacledbunnys]

Attica Locke - Mystery/Thriller Fiction

Oyinkan Braithwaite - Fiction

Isabel Wilkerson - Non-fiction

[leebrontide]

Hell yeah!!!

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know sometimes I remember that there was a book I absolutely loved in high school where a girl catches her mother and boyfriend fucking, runs away to New York City, gets addicted to shooting up fairy dust with a group of homeless goths, and then uses the power of lacross and a crush on a troll to get really good at sword fighting

late 00s YA urban fantasy was a delightful mess

[marzipanandminutiae]

other smash hits on Marzi's teen bookshelf included:

boy who is a ghost hunter falls in love with ghost who has Compulsively Kill People As Violently As Possible Disease (after she literally rips his friend in half in front of him. like. considerably after that. that is the first time they meet. I didn't read the sequel because she's apparently barely in it)

the love triangle isn't actually a love triangle; everyone wants the two leads to get together because of Faerie Destiny Bullshit and they are both unwaveringly in love with other people and therefore miserable (you WILL forget the many many intricate fae politics subplots between book releases)

what if vampirism was a parasite? what if there were a giant worm under NYC also?

this might be a wacky supernatural buddy comedy road trip OR the hallucinations/delerium of the protagonist as he dies of Mad Cow Disease in a hospital

Southern Gothic don't talk about slavery all servant characters past and present are carefully racially ambiguous hey look Forbidden Love and a tragic Destiny!!!! and the manic pixie dream girl is actually the main character!!!! yayyyyyy you ARE better than the popular girls if you pretend to read Bukowski shut up about slavery

Steampunk WWI With A Giant Airship Whale Fuck Yeah

[marzipanandminutiae]

by Popular Request:

Anna Dressed In Blood

the Faerie Court series

Peeps

Going Bovine

Beautiful Creatures/the Caster Chronicals (DNF)

Leviathan

[isabelreads]

going bovine is prob one of the greatest ya books of all time tbh (leviathan also slays and is being adapted for netflix as some kind of anime?)

[fishparasite]

that woman is not a girlboss she is a victim

[fishparasite]

a female character does something terrible and some people can't afford to consider her own personal tragedy. so they make her a girlboss. #feminism. but she's as tragic as the rest of them.

[aniisol]

this is it right

[strelka]

can you guys stop making posts that i materially agree with but that are worded in ways i find too disagreeable to be reblogged. it rankles

[desinteresse]

It’s rotten work but only if it’s you. When I do it for other people it’s fine, enjoyable even.

[eudaemaniacal]

really gr8 customer last night

[bacteriocide]

child: i like comics.

child: i want to read a new comic.

child: *with incredible solemnity* but i am only ten years old. it has to be appropriate.

[justnoodlefishthings]

life on earth isn't all too bad but I'd be lying if i said i wouldn't leave in a heartbeat if it meant i could be some woodland creachure in a fantasy setting

[justnoodlefishthings]

i don't want a career i want to be a blupee

[justnoodlefishthings]

I am going to stomp you to death with my hooves

[classicslesbianopinions]

lysistrata more like seize the means of production

[catbrarian]

cats and libraries ۫ ꣑ৎ

[prokopetz]

If you wanna make fun of sci-fi naming conventions effectively, you've gotta remember that the "Glup Shitto" school of naming is literally just Star Wars. Other, more widespread approaches include:

Bracingly monosyllabic

Teenage goth DeviantArt handle

Yeah, I guess you can technically put those letters in that order

That is a weight loss drug, not a person

Too poor to afford vowels

Ambiguously German

My middle name is "the"

[xenosagaepisodeone]

newbie asked if we're supposed to look out for 'red flags' in interlibrary loan requests in reference to a request a patron had made for a book about cannibalism. she was looking expectantly at me like she was expecting me to be equally aghast at this........girl why would you work at a library if you want to play book police

[drtanner]

I'm fascinated to know what kind of world this girl lives in. For what reason are those books in the library at all if not to be checked out and read? Are they there as honeypots for Problematic People™? If you check out a Red Flag Book™, you've fallen into the Evil Person Trap™ and need to be taken in for reeducation, I suppose.

[tanadrin]

On the other side of this, I love the mental image of a guy who’d really like to get into cannibalism but doesn’t know where to start, so he heads down to his local library for some pointers.

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

#yeah don’t be weird about what they read — but like um — asking for a book on how to abuse your child is kind of a request that I#dont want to complete and I’m glad to not be there anymore#like I’m a mandatory reporter and have been asked to get a book on how to abuse children — um — conflict of interest no?#and this is not a case of my exaggeration — that book when searched had news articles and lawsuits because children died#it wasn’t in our system so I had to send it to the ILL person and it was their judgement call#but yikes

So I understand having a reaction like that on a gut level (I'm guessing the book was To Train Up a Child, as I've read several news articles about abuse cases in which it was mentioned), but here's the crucial thing that we learn in our very first semester of library school:

You do not know why somebody wants to read a particular book.

Is it possible they wanted to read it for terrible fundamentalist Christian parenting advice? Sure. But it's also possible they read the same news articles about the abuse cases that I did and were simply intrigued about what the book actually said. It's possible they were doing research on fundamentalism or abuse and thought it was an important piece of material to include. It's possible they suspected their own parents used were inspired by the book and wanted to have a better understanding about what happened to them as a child. It's possible they actually wanted How to Train Your Dragon and got the titles confused. You just don't know!

Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody ask for materials on topics that I find unsavoury, only to learn later that said person was doing research on extremism, denial, etc. and very much didn't agree with the materials in question. Hell, sometimes I have students coming in saying "I need help finding scholarly articles on why vaccines are bad/gay marriage shouldn't be legal/Women don't deserve equal pay/etc," only to have it turn out the student is actually making the opposite argument in their paper, but were told by the instructor they need to have one credible opposing source.

The reasons people have for reading things are not cut and dry, and even if somebody is more inclined to have a certain viewpoint, you still can't know with any certainty what they'll actually think of the book once they've read it. They could agree with the premise. They could disagree with it. They could find it boring and not absorb much of the content. They could forget to read the book before it's due back and return it without even cracking the spine.

We cannot presume to know the intentions of our patrons based solely on the content they're requesting. That kind of logic is for cops, not librarians.

[isabelreads]

this 100%. every time I see a YouTuber suggest someone should be keeping Colleen Hoover out of the hands of children I'm like "you mean the parents" because as a bookseller for a number of years it's not my job to check someone's ID before they buy a book

[quaggly]

every shitty book now is called something like a court of shit and fuck or something equally stupid. books used to be called frindle and we liked it. we liked it

[orpheuslament]

give me a world you have taken the world i was tuesday

[elucubrare]

there's this horrible school of attempted literary criticism on here that holds that 1. everything in any given author's work is autobiographical, especially if it seems "real" and 2. those themes seeped into the work subconsciously, revealing something about the author that they're either trying to hide or unaware of themself. it drives me up a wall, since it seems to deny the fundamental skills that make people good writers: the empathy to imagine and portray experiences that one hasn't had oneself and the ability to take one's personal emotional experiences or worldview and fold them, consciously, into the unworked clay of a narrative.

[boneyardpicnic]

Reblog this or whatever and show me what you're currently reading!

[isabelreads]

I think you would love Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Cordova. I wrote my masters thesis on it and it's an exploration of cannibalism, grief, and queer identity wrapped in a lovely little magical realist horror package.

My current read is this recent-ish release, Martyr, by Kaveh Akbar, one of my favorite poets. It's his first novel and it's very literary which is not my typical read but it's weird and kind of meta so I'm enjoying it.

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

Uh, guys? Don't confuse your crappy televised fanfic for the story that Tolkien actually wrote.

Galadriel was never "under Sauron's thrall." That's something ROP made up. In Unfinished Tales, she was the only one in Eregion who suspected that Annatar was lying about being an emissary of the Valar. Celebrimbor was deceived by him. She was not. She was certainly not "under his thrall." No, not even because she had Nenya.

Yes, when Frodo offered her the One Ring, she was tempted. It could have given her the power to prevent the fading of Lothlórien. But when she makes this speech in the book, and in the Peter Jackson movies, it's her own thought, she's not repeating something that Sauron said to her once:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

These are Galadriel's words. Her words. Not Sauron's. And she was tempted by the One Ring because she could have been a more powerful queen, not Sauron's queen. Like, you guys really took one of the most powerful and complex female characters in Tolkien's works and you made her story all about a man and his power over her and his manipulation of her. Fuck off.

And stop tagging ROP as Lord of the Rings.

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

Your tags passed peer review. And yes that is EXACTLY what Amazon did, they tried to make Galadriel's speech where she overcomes the ultimate temptation about that wet cat of a man. ROP had a scene where he asks her to be his queen (never mind that Sauron would never share power) and says he'll make her stronger than the foundations of the earth, etc., retroactively making it seem like her speech in FOTR is a callback to that. The loathing I feel for the Amazon writers is unparalleled.