.

studyblr + litblr sideblog run by mar (spanish, xxi, english student).

[hayaomiyazaki]

resources for discovering lgbt cinema

i’m most regularly asked about discovering lgbt cinema to watch, both by those starting from the bottom and those past the “classics” google always regurgitates over and over. that’s why i want to talk about some resources you can use to learn about lgbt films new and old and national and international and good and bad and healthy and problematic — because lgbt cinema is hella varied and goes all the way back to silent film.

disclaimer: lgbt cinema is not always explicit melodrama. a lot — no, most, considering the entire history of cinema — of lgbt narratives are subtextual and/or coded. if you prefer stories like, say, brokeback mountain, in which the explicit physicality of their relationship is an active and essential part of the narrative — its foundation, its romance, its tragedy — i am not judging you whatsoever. we all like to see ourselves onscreen, and that includes the nsfw moments. still, please understand coming into the history of film, which is over a hundred years old, that this can feel rare and far between in the years before, say, 1980. as well, a majority (as in, more than half) of lgbt cinema is “problematic” — sometimes to a startling degree. spatio-temporal context is important when we’re considering any film, but this does not necessarily excuse it. your relationship with each and every film is personal, but please be warned.

one of my favourite resources for today’s films (which i believe is relevant to a lot of you who prefer contemporary technique and performance-driven narratives):

cannes film festival has been nominating lgbt-related films for an award called the queer palm for the last 8+ years, which encompasses international lgbt cinema, some of which are so niche they don’t have wikipedia pages. these films are generally art house dramas and reliably diverse: they are not only about straight-passing, beautiful white men — though some, inevitably, knowing the film industry as it is, are.

similar awards include berlin’s teddy award and venice’s queer lion

though i do not consider wikipedia particularly reliable, here are some mildly useful lists:

list of lgbt film awards and their nominees (will hopefully filter for some quality cinema)

list of international lgbt film festivals (can provide independent, student, arthouse, and foreign titles)

lgbt-related adaptations of works by shakespeare (other lgbt film lists here)

list of animated films with lgbt characters

my favourite master list, though, exists on mubi. i know a lot of “cinephile” (whatever that means anymore) types go hard for letterboxd, but imo mubi is more organised and live streams art cinema all day for free (they have a streaming service you can pay for but you don’t have to do so to have an account and use the site functions). users can create lists, and here are a couple i reference a lot:

the master list to end all master lists with over 7,000 lgbt and lgbt-related films

a much more concise list of 150 titles that serves as a great place to start, a kind of “queer cinema 101″ guide (and another but about 250 titles, for when you’re ready to cautiously level up)

another thing i love about mubi is that it often has a “related films” section of a title’s page. for example, i recently watched wild reeds, a gay film by andré téchiné, and when i scroll down to the bottom of its page i can see “related” titles, which appear to be other téchiné titles, lgbt french films, and international coming-of-age romances. this isn’t 100% reliable and the suggestions are not always related by genre (like lgbt), but i’ve found more than one film i want to watch by going to the pages of films i found interesting and checking this feature out!

back to lists: another of my favourite resources in the natural world is bfi(; this is partly because i studied british cinema, so i am biased, but this does not mean all of their recommendations are british films, even if this is what they are most well-versed in). they create fantastic, dynamic lists that are not “best of,” but instead “hey here’s 10 great films,” and i appreciate that so much because trying to quantify all of cinema into some kind of categorical end-all, be-all list is 1) reductive, 2) academic, and 3) if philippe garrel says don’t do it then don’t do it!!! bfi has quite a few lgbt lists with tons of hidden treasure films:

10 great lesser-known british lgbt films

10 great films about queer activism

10 great lgbt thrillers

10 great transgender films

10 great lesbian films

10 great american lesbian films

10 great gay horror films

10 great canadian lesbian, gay and transgender films

10 great jewish lgbt films

10 great lgbt films from east and south-east asia

10 great gay british films

10 great lgbt films from latin america

10 great gay french films

*** you can (and should) look through their general lists here

here are miscellaneous resources you can consider:

lgbt films during the silent era

lgbt celebs & artists champion queer works that are special to them

list of nearly every many canon lgbt couples from the history of english-language television

2,200 lgbt short and full-length films free on youtube

lgbt films on: bfi player / netflix / hulu / bbc three iplayer / logo / prime video / roku

and, finally, here are a few resources from my own blog in case they are useful to you! my film recommendations are not comprehensive lists including all relevant films, but films i personally enjoyed or found particularly thought-provoking.

70s & 80s lgbt film recs

contemporary foreign lgbt film recs

italian lgbt film recs

spanish, portuguese, and latinx lgbt film recs

transgender film recs

lgbt films ~like maurice, brideshead, etc.

not-too-sad lgbt film recs

my general lgbt films tag

[akajustmerry]

video essays i’ve loved a lot recently!

the history of dieting is crazier than you think - a history of diet culture, its phases, faces, and diet culture media by mina le

When Hollywood Speaks Chinese, I Cringe - short essay about the cringey racist way Chinese language is portrayed in Hollywood

Good LGBT Representation is Boring (and why that’s a problem) - essay that dives into the double edge sword of “unproblematic” lgbt rep

The Decline of History Channel - a history of the history channel and how it lost almost all credibility. 

The Black Right Wing - fascinating essay on Black Americans who support Donald Trump, right wing politics and why that is. 

Can We Kill the Final Girl Trope Already? - one of my favourite essays ever about the first girl who dies in horror films.

Exploring The “Gender Critical” Radicalization Pipeline - tw: major transphobia, an essay about how TERF ideology online radicalises people to the right

A Buffet of Black Food History - do not watch this on an empty stomach! essay about the history of Black American food, culture and the success of Black cooks/chefs

No, Superhero Movies are NOT Like Westerns - excellent breakdown of all the reasons why the current proliferation of superhero films is not comparable culturally, economically or artistically to Westerns.

Maybe you should stay in the closet?…Coming Out re-examined - personal vlog/video essay about the history of “coming out” as lgbt and the culture around doing so has changed

The Matrix Resurrections Is Absolutely Beautiful - an analysis/review of the beautifully executed trans-ness of latest matrix films

make more characters bi, you cowards: why (not) romance? - analysis on the current state of bisexual representation in pop culture 

Heterofatalism: WHY straight women aren’t okay. - absolutely wild essay on the complex cultural attitudes that encourages straight women to hate themselves for loving men

The Pandemic Onscreen - How Film & TV Do Covid - analysis of the different ways fictional media is acknowledging the pandemic

[foulserpent]

saying “i dont find conventional attractiveness attractive” just sounds like im trying to be the most Enlightened and Progressive person in the room but its like, its not even trying to be a statement bc conventional attractiveness is so lacking in humanity

like… clear skin, clean shaven, manicured faces, an uncomfortably starved physique, and (if a woman) the expectation of elaborate and time consuming makeup for the sole purpose of removing all human flaws, shaved arms and legs, invisible pores, etc etc.

its so unsexy. its like… the body as a minimalist rich person house or a flawlessly manicured suburban lawn. its a performance and not lived in.

[tiktaalic]

everyone is beautiful and no one is horny goes into this in a way i really liked. some quotes:

Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs. And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. And yet, no one is horny. Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.

In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol. And when Isabella Rosselini strips in Blue Velvet, her skin is pale and her body is soft. She looks vulnerable and real. 

[about Poltergeist] The house looks real, too. There are toys and magazines scattered around the floor. There are cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked since the recent move. Framed pictures rest against the wall; the parents haven’t gotten around to mounting them yet. The kitchen counters are cluttered and mealtimes are rambunctious and sloppy, as one expects in a house with three children. They’re building a pool in the backyard, but not for appearances: it’s a place for the kids to swim, for the parents to throw parties, and for the father to reacquaint himself with his love of diving. At the time, this house represented an aspirational ideal of American affluence. Compare this to homes in films now: massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.

Kate writes, “The inside of McMansions are designed in order to cram the most ‘features’ inside for the lowest costs.” These features exist to increase the house’s resale value, not to make it a good place to live. No thought is given to the labor needed to clean and maintain these spaces. The master bathroom includes intricate stone surfaces that can only be scrubbed with a toothbrush; the cathedral ceilings in the living room raise the heating and cooling costs to an exorbitant sum; the chandelier in the grand entryway dangles so high that no one can replace the bulbs in it, even with a stepladder.The same fate has befallen our bodies. A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure during our brief time in the land of the living. It is not a home to live in and be happy. It, too, is a collection of features: six pack, thigh gap, cum gutters. And these features exist not to make our lives more comfortable, but to increase the value of our assets. Our bodies are investments, which must always be optimized to bring us… what, exactly? Some vague sense of better living? Is a life without bread objectively better than a life with it? When we were children, did we dream of counting every calorie and logging every step?

When a body receives fewer calories, it must prioritize essential life support systems over any function not strictly necessary for the body’s immediate survival. Sexual desire falls into the latter category, as does high-level abstract thought. A body that restricts food and increases exercise believes it is undergoing a famine, which is not an ideal time to reproduce.Is there anything more cruelly Puritanical than enshrining a sexual ideal that leaves a person unable to enjoy sex?

[soracities]

any good non fiction books recs? i often like art related or memoiry sort of thing…no worries if not ! love ur account n you 💓💓💓

you’re lovely thank you ♡

for art and nonfiction, my first rec is absolutely john berger john berger john berger!! you can try any of his shorter collections (confabulations or bento's sketchbook) or dive into his selected essays which is huge but very much worth it in my opinion

would also highly recommend:

bluets, maggie nelson

still life with oysters and lemon, mark doty

living, thinking, looking, siri hustvedt

camera lucida & a lover’s discourse, roland barthes

feel free: essays, zadie smith

upstream, mary oliver

the rings of saturn, w.g. sebald

on photography, susan sontag

[vympr]

Some articles and essays (and a short story!) about sex, desire, and the politics of both, that I think are best read together. I'm posting these because I learned a lot from reading them, but I'm also left with a lot of questions and would be really interested to know what you all think!

Pussy Hounds by Sarah Gerard (short story)

On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu (essay + theory)

Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex? by Amia Srinivasan (essay + theory)

Wanting Bad Things by Andrea Long Chu and Anastasia Berg (transcript of an interview)

(Btw just to be clear, I am not agreeing wholeheartedly with ANY of the authors, but I think they all bring up interesting and valid points which I am interested in further exploring)

[vympr]

short stories i love + the best times to read them. links or PDFs provided where i was able to find them 💞

cannibal lover by alisa nutting

Best read when you desperately want to be in love with someone who keeps saying you're too good for them

the man on the stairs by miranda july

Best read when you're lying awake at night unable to sleep and you think you hear something on the stairs

pinky finger by ha seong-nan

Best read when your uber is taking a little too long to arrive

you're ugly, too by lorrie moore

Best read when you're realizing you might be the black sheep of the family/friend group/social circle

boys go to jupiter by danielle evans

Best read when the white girl you know is doing some dumbass shit

ant colony by alisa nutting

Best read when you want a weird body horror story that will make you stare blankly out the window after you finish

attack helicopter by isabel fall

Best read when you're thinking, 'there's no way rainbow capitalism could get any worse'

what dinah knew by yah yah scholfield

Best read when a family member is acting a little funny

the frolic by thomas ligotti

Best read when you're beginning to dread that you've made a big mistake

[rjzimmerman]

Jane Goodall’s Survival Guide

The eighty-seven-year-old naturalist knocks around her home on the south coast of England and explains why, despite the floods and fires and melting ice caps, she’s still optimistic about planet Earth.

Excerpt from this story from The New Yorker:

Everywhere she went, she met young people who were “angry, depressed, or just apathetic, because, they’ve told me, we have compromised their future and they feel there is nothing they can do about it,” she writes in her twenty-first and most recent work, “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.” Amid flooding and wildfires, impassivity and eco-grief, the question she was asked most often was “Do you honestly believe there is hope for our world?”

She does, and she’ll tell you why. “The Book of Hope,” which she wrote with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson, is structured like a dialogue in which the naturalist (Ph.D., D.B.E., U.N. Messenger of Peace) plays whack-a-mole with the darkest fears we hold for our ailing planet. Stories of the human intellect and indomitable spirit abound. Also, the resilience of nature and the power of young people. Hope, she argues, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” She noted, “If you don’t have hope that your action is going to make a difference, why bother to do anything? You just become a zombie.”

[tisorridalamor]

Hey tumblr is not the place for this kinda question BUT I want to read more nonfiction. Anyone have any good recs?

[ninja-muse]

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - the story of the Great Migration, largely told through the lives of three migrants

Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies - biographies of European countries that no longer exist and are often barely remembered

Ace by Angela Chen - an asexual journalist talks to other aces and discusses how their orientation (and other marginalizations) affect their lives

The Unidentified by Colin Dickey - a history of pseudoscientific thinking (UFOs, cryptids, conspiracies, etc.), mostly in the US, with forays into the state of the world today

How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman - a history of Victorian domestic and social life, written with a “day in the life” structure

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan - a history of the world focusing on the Middle East and Central Asia, rather than the West

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene - a good introduction to string theory

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen Brusatte - what we currently know about the evolution of dinosaurs and the world they lived in

anything by Mary Roach - she’s a funny science journalist who’s made a career of finding scientists in odd fields and asking them questions. I rec Fuzz, Stiff, and Spook especially (animal-human conflict, cadavers, paranormal, respectively).

SPQR by Mary Beard - a history of ancient Rome that focuses on the average people, rather than the elites

Zealot by Resa Aslan - a biography of Jesus Christ the man and messiah, and a look at how his preaching was shaped into Christianity after his execution

anything by James Herriot - cozy and charming stories about being a vet in 1930s Yorkshire

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch - an overview of Internet English, where it comes from and why it’s fascinating

Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith - cephalopod intelligence and how it may have evolved

Time Travel by James Gleick - a history of time travel in culture, from science fiction to relativity to time capsules and beyond

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty - a memoir about working in a crematory and a peek into the funeral industry

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor - a young man walks across western Europe in the 1930s

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks - case studies of people with unusual memory impairments

[queerbookcorner]

Kicking off Historical Queer Fiction recs with 20 adult fiction titles written about actual historical figures.

600-500 BC / Sappho’s Leap by Erica Jong (Sappho)

300s BC / Fire from Heaven & The Persian Boy by Mary Renault (Alexander the Great)

1600s AD / Moll Cutpurse, Her True History by Ellen Galford (Moll Cutpurse)

1724 / Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg  (Jack Sheppard) 

1770s / The Ladies by Doris Grumbach (Ladies of Llangollen)

1830s / The Moss House by Clara Barley  (Anne Lister+Ann Walker)

1840s / Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Bayard  (Abraham Lincoln+Joshua Speed)

1850s- The Whale by Mark Beauregard (Herman Melville+Nathaniel Hawthorne)

1855 / The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell by William Klaber  (Joseph Lobdell)

1890s / The God of Mirrors by Robert Reilly (Oscar Wilde)

1895 / The Master by Colm Toibin  (Henry James)

1897 / What’s Left of the Night by Ersi Sotiropoulos  (Constantine Cavafy)

1900s / The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd

1912/ Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut  (E.M. Forster)

1927 / The Last Nude by Ellis Avery (Tamara de Lempicka)

1930s / White Houses by Amy Bloom  (Lorena Hickok+Eleanor Eleanor Roosevelt)

1930s / Undiscovered Country by Kelly O'Connor McNees (Lorena Hickok+Eleanor Eleanor Roosevelt)

1937 / Paris, 7 A.M. by Liza Wieland (Elizabeth Bishop)

1950s / Dancer by Colum McCann  (Rudolf Nureyev)

1953 / Leading Men by Christopher Castellani  (Tennessee Williams)

[queerbookcorner]

Hope you all like the Victorian Era, because next up on our Queer Historical Fiction recs is an abundance of titles from that time period! Those marked with ✧ have magical realism or minor fantasy elements. Those with a ✦ are historical fantasy.

The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu  ✦

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley  ✧

The Brilliant Death by Amy Rose Capetta  ✦

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue

Parasol Protectorate Series by Gail Carriger  ✦

Affinity by Sarah Waters

Timekeeper Series by Tara Sim  ✦

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley  ✧

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison

The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco

The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

The Custard Protocol by Gail Carriger  ✦

Illusions by Madeline J. Reynolds  ✦

Drapetomania by John R. Gordon

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman

Everfair by Nisi Shawl  ✦

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

American Hippo by Sarah Gailey

Wildthorn by Jane Eagland

The Binding by Bridget Collins  ✦

The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan ✦

[rockislandadultreads]

AAPI Month: Fiction Picks

Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month:  Authors & Works in Fiction

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Nestled in the Hudson Valley is a sumptuous retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, private fitness trainers, daily massages—and all of it for free. In fact, you get paid big money—more than you’ve ever dreamed of—to spend a few seasons in this luxurious locale. The catch? For nine months, you belong to the Farm. You cannot leave the grounds; your every move is monitored. Your former life will seem a world away as you dedicate yourself to the all-consuming task of producing the perfect baby for your überwealthy clients. Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines and a struggling single mother, is thrilled to make it through the highly competitive Host selection process at the Farm. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her own young daughter’s well-being, Jane grows desperate to reconnect with her life outside. Yet she cannot leave the Farm or she will lose the life-changing fee she’ll receive on delivery—or worse. Heartbreaking, suspenseful, provocative, The Farm pushes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit to the extremes, and raises crucial questions about the trade-offs women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy–the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration–Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood

Following two families from Pakistan and Iraq in the 1990s to San Francisco in 2016, Bad Muslim Discount is a hilarious, timely, and provocative comic novel about being Muslim immigrants in modern America. For fans of Hanif Kureshi, Mira Jacob, and Mohammed Hanif. It is 1995, and Anvar Faris is a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy doing his best to grow up in Karachi, Pakistan. As fundamentalists in the government become increasingly strident and the zealots next door start roaming the streets in gangs to help make Islam great again, his family decides, not quite unanimously, to start life over in California. The irony is not lost on Anvar that in America, his deeply devout mother and his model-Muslim brother are the ones who fit right in with the tightly knit and gossipy Desi community. Anvar wants more. At the same time, thousands of miles away, Safwa, a young girl suffocating in war-torn Baghdad with her grief-stricken, conservative father will find a very different and far more dangerous path to America. These two narratives are intrinsically linked, and when their worlds come together, the fates of two remarkably different people intertwine and set off a series of events that rock their whole community to its core. The Bad Muslim Discount is an irreverent, dramatic, and often hysterically funny debut novel by an amazing new voice. With deep insight, warmth, and an irreverent sense of humor, Syed Masood examines quirky and intense familial relationships, arranged marriage, Islamic identity, and how to live together in modern America.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father’s untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.

[queerbookcorner]

Featuring over 100 different titles spanning from Ancient times to the 1980s, here’s our reclists divided by era for your reading enjoyment!

Ancient Times

Medieval Period

16th and 17th Century

18th Century

Victorian Era

Edwardian Era

1920s & 1930s

1940s & 1950s

1960s, 1970s & 1980s

Bonus: Queer Fiction inspired by actual historical people

[rockislandadultreads]

Set in the 80′s: Fiction Picks

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed–or untoyed with–by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls–until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true–though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place–revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them. 1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life—someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart. At Finn’s funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most. An emotionally charged coming-of-age novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a tender story of love lost and found, an unforgettable portrait of the way compassion can make us whole again.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives. At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson’s taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming of age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony– a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody’s parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they’ve paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives–even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

[somerabbitholes]

hello! do you have any recommendations for indian historical fiction? ;; also! i recently read miri jiyori(about a tribe) and chinatown days(indo china war of the 1960s), both are translations and i think that you might like them too!

hello! thank you, i will definitely check those out. here are a few i’ve read/are on my list (mind you, i don’t read as much historical fiction as i would like to, but we’re also in luck because what I read tends to be indian/south asian)

a flight of pigeons by ruskin bond: set during the revolt of 1857 in north india; about a family who is at the receiving end of rebel anger and who take hindu and muslim help to save themselves; it is ruskin bond so i don’t even need to spell out why it’s great

midnight’s children by salman rushdie: set in bombay right after independence, revolves around salim and a thousand other people who are all born at the stroke of midnight of august 15 and all of whom are extraordinarily talented; about the transition in the 1940s, early indepdence bombay and india 

a fine balance by rohinton mistry: about four people in bombay in 1975 just after the emergency was declared who are brought together given the political and social upheavals; explores caste, privilege, friendship against the backdrop of turbulent politics

the lives of others by neel mukherjee: about a family in kolkata which is representative of changes in west bengal and india with the east pakistan crisis and the naxal movement; this is for you if you love stories spanning generations

fortune’s soldier by alex rutherford: a fictionalised take on robert clive and his arrival in india and subsequent career in the east india company as one of its highly gifted generals; really nice because it is complex in its portrait of clive and his times; explores both the indian social dynamics and, more importantly, the scottish presence in early mercantile operations in india

the black hill by mamang dai: set in 19th century arunachal pradesh, a little before the revolt of 1857; about a bunch of people in upper assam (around the brahmaputra), one of them is a missionary, others are villagers, and hill tribes; about local responses to foreign rule; shows the tensions in tribal villages against the backdrop of british annexations and assimilative policies really well;

the glass palace by amitav ghosh: set in burma in 1885, just around the british annexation of the land; abut a boy who ends up building a teak empire in burma’s forests, and his search for a young woman as a rich man years later across burma, india, and malaya

kanthapura by raja rao: i’m not sure this entirely fits the historical fiction bill, but it’s an important book either way; about how gandhian independence struggle arrived in a south indian village and how people received gandhian principles; it’s kind of heavy with the mythological references and everything, so mind that

aavarana by s. l. bhyrappa (translated by sandeep balakrishna): about a woman in aurangzeb’s india who converts from hinduism to islam but is later disillusioned when she sees religious ethic being used to justify a great deal of oppression; it’s very raw but it’s also brutally honest

if you read hindi, there’s tamas (तमस) by bhisham sahni, which is about partition riots; it explores people on both sides of the communal divide and it’s partly based on sahni’s life and experiences with the partition too. i’m not sure if there’s a translation and if there is one who’s it by so you’ll have to check that

tamrapat by rangnath pathare: it’s marathi, and i’m unsure if there’s a translation, but you can keep track if one comes along; it’s an absolute giant of a book and it kind of intimidates me; paints a picture of politics and society from 1942 to 1979 through stories of a series of people and associations

and now for two that aren’t technically indian but i think you should check out anyway

a case of exploding mangoes by mohammad hanif: based on the plane crash that killed general zia ul-haq; the novel dramatizes it, in that it’s about a pakistani air force pilot who is on a mission to kill the general and so he assembles a motley crew; the book was well-received and it’s supposed to darkly funny

in the time of the others by nadeem zaman: about a man who’s stuck in east pakistan during 1971 as the pakistani army attacks and as the mukti bahini gathers steam; about living in violent times and tensions in south asia during then

i hope you find something you like in these. happy reading :)

[zoobus]

I’m the TikTok Couch Guy. Here’s What It Was Like Being Investigated on the Internet.

The invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing cul

Posted without commentary:

On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commenters—Lauren’s close friends—had positive things to say. But soon strangers—among whom the video was less well received—began commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. “Girl he ain’t loyal.” “Red flag! He didn’t get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.” “Bro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.”

As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, à la “The Dress.” I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTok’s latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Lauren’s video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.

While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me—people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.” During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”

At times, the investigation even transcended the digital world—for instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, “Even if this guy turned off his phone, he can’t escape the couch guy notifications,” a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didn’t), a comment suggested that they “secretly see who’s coming and going from his place”—and received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the “frenzy … frantically trying to determine the identity” of the “mystery man” behind the meme, the Post asked, “Will the real ‘couch guy’ please stand up?” Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.

Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a “body language expert” who concluded that my accusers “might be onto something,” since the “angle of [my] knees signals disinterest” and my “hands hint that [I’m] defensive.” This tabloid body language analysis—something typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listers—made me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.

Mercifully, my memedom has died down—interest in the Google search term “Couch Guy” peaked on Oct. 5—and I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather—as tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggested—the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.

The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the app’s algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slate’s ICYMI podcast noted how her “For You page just decided I simply needed to see” TikTok users’ Gabby Petito videos “over and over again.” It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of “Couch Guy TikTok.” One user despairingly reported seeing “five tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.” (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guy’s omnipresence more than myself.)

The most recent target of the app’s emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The video’s virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the video’s apparent “bad vibes”—at which point I got a dreadful sense of déjà vu. As Prater’s video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: “It was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.”

Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.

Certainly, noncelebrities have long unwillingly become public figures, and digital pile-ons have existed in some form since the dawn of the digital age—just ask Monica Lewinsky. But on TikTok, algorithmic feedback loops and the nature of the For You page make it easier than ever for regular people to be thrust against their wishes into the limelight. And the extent of our collective power is less obvious online, where pile-ons are delivered, as journalist Jon Ronson put it, “like remotely administered drone strikes.” On the receiving end of the barrage, however, as one finds their reputation challenged, body language hyperanalyzed, and privacy invaded, the severity of our collective power is made much too clear.

[zoobus]

I'm glad the collective response to this has been "this is horrifying" and "body language ✌️experts✌️ and self proclaimed vibe readers are threats" but there is concerning number of you who think this behavior is specific to TikTok or to a generation. Particularly seeing tags that suggest Tumblr users would never because Tumblr users use sources, Tumblr listens to victims, Tumblr only doxxes the right people. There are reasons there's less Boston Bomber issues here and none of them are because we are an inherently moral userbase.

Tiktok might be a uniquely brain dampening, mob enhancing platform by design but don't get it twisted; harassment campaigns built on nothing but a vague sense of distrust and gleeful sadism/schadenfreude for strangers happen here constantly.

If you think you're exempt from mob mentality because your mob only has good people in it, you have likely forgotten your victims, if you even understood that's what they were. The article is talking about you too.

[oumaimas]

“If you want to emit as much CO2 as possible, there is no faster way than to go on a flying binge. That also comes close to the definition of being rich today. One single flight from London to Edinburgh emits more CO2 than the average Somalian does in a year; from London to New York, more than the Nigerian and the Nepalese; from London to Perth, more than the Peruvian and the Egyptian, the Kenyan and the Indian. There are fifty-six countries in the world with annual per capita emissions lower than the emissions from one individual flying once between London and New York. These figures work on conservative estimates of the impact of aviation. Who spews this fire from the skies? Even in such a flying-prone country as England, 1 per cent of residents took a fifth of all overseas flights in 2018; 10 per cent took half and 48 per cent none. But the super-rich prefer their very own planes, or renting one from Warren Buffett, whose fleet of luxury dragons cruise the skies to predictable effect. The private jets operating in the US alone generate as much CO2 as half of Burundi does in a year. This family of emissions has a well-attested ethical status. It was first pinpointed in 1991 in a classic essay by two Indian climate scholars and activists, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, who took issue with calculations that treated all emissions as equal. ‘Can we really equate’, they asked, ‘the carbon dioxide contributions of gas guzzling automobiles in Europe and North America or, for that matter, anywhere in the Third World with the methane emissions of draught cattle and rice fields of subsistence farmers in West Bengal or Thailand? Do these people not have a right to live?’ A quantum of methane from a ruminant or paddy might have the same radiative forcing as a quantum of CO2 from an SUV, Agarwal and Narain accepted, but the moral substances are like chalk and cheese.”

— How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm

[marescorner]

thinking about joining tandem or one of those language exchange programs to try and get back into german in a more informal way (though trying to find time for an actual proper review and self-study schedule at some point). but i don't know if that's a good idea, or of i should write a tinder-like post here looking for someone interested in language exchange but not apps.