#lit recs

[luthienne]

currently reading:

except for palestine: the limits of progressive politics by marc lamont hill & mitchell plitnick

palestine: a socialist introduction, ed. by sumaya awad & brian bean

on my non-fiction reading list:

the question of palestine, edward said

the hundred years’ war on palestine, rashid khalidi

palestinian identity, rashid khalidi

ten myths about israel, ilan pappé

the ethnic cleansing of palestine, ilan pappé

on palestine, noam chomsky & ilan pappé

blaming the victims: spurious scholarship and the palestinian question, ed. by edward said & christopher hitchens

the case for sanctions against israel, ed. by audrea lim

justice for some: law and the question of palestine, noura erakat

freedom is a constant struggle, angela davis

the butterfly's burden, mahmoud darwish

on my fiction reading list:

minor detail, adania shibli

enter ghost, isabella hammad

salt houses, hala alyan

men in the sun, ghassan kanafani

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

de - [gunshot noises]

[fassina]

From Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin

[letterful]

ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION,

or: a few of my favourite poems about dying, being dead, & the ones who are left behind. some melancholic, some upbeat, some morbid, some euphemistic, some sombre, some tongue-in-cheek, some direct, some not, all good. in no particular order:

— “on death, without exaggeration“, wisława szymborska (oh, it has its triumphs, / but look at its countless defeats, / missed blows, / and repeat attempts!) — “the suicide’s room”, wisława szymborska (a lamp, good for fighting the dark / a desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers / carefree buddha and a worried christ / seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.) — “the letters of the dead”, wisława szymborska (poor dead, blindfolded dead, / gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.) (can you tell that i’m very fond of wisława szymborska?) — “harlod’s leap”, stevie smith (it may have killed you / but it was a brave thing to do.) — “not waving but drowning”, stevie smith (i was much further out than you thought / and not waving but drowning) — “a meeting”, wendell berry (he has, / i know, gone long and far, / and yet he is the same / for the dead are changeless.) — “the dead”, billy collins (the dead are always looking down on us, they say) — “memory”, hayden carruth (my dear, / how could you have let this happen to you?) — “her long illness”, donald hall (daybreak until nightfall, / he sat by his wife at the hospital / while chemotherapy dripped / through the catheter into her heart.) — “this is a photograph of me”, margaret atwood (the photograph was taken / the day after i drowned.) — “owl song”, margaret atwood (i do not want revenge, i do not want expiation, / i only want to ask someone / how i was lost, / how i was lost) — “the promise”, marie howe (he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if / there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.) — “aubade”, philip larkin (being brave / lets no one off the grave. / death is no different whined at than withstood.) — “lady lazarus”, sylvia plath (and i a smiling woman. / i am only thirty. / and like the cat i have nine times to die.) — “edge”, sylvia plath (her bare / feet seem to be saying: / we have come so far, it is over.) — “sylvia’s death”, anne sexton (what is your death / but an old belonging, / a mole that fell out / of one of your poems?) — “a curse against elegies”, anne sexton (also, i am tired of all the dead. / they refuse to listen) — “anne sexton’s last letter to god”, tracey herd (i have just lunched with an old friend / saying goodbye and something / ‘she couldn’t quite catch’.) — “ophelia’s confession”, tracey herd (i didn’t drown by accident. it was a suicide. / at least let me call my mind my own / even when my heart was gone beyond recall.) — “tomorrow they’ll cut me open”, anna swir (i have many powers in me. i can live, / i can run, dance and sing. / all of that is in me, but if need be, / i’ll walk away.) — “biology teacher”, zbigniew herbert (in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies) — “dedication”, czesław miłosz (you whom i could not save / listen to me.) — “dirge without music”, edna st. vincent millay (they are gone. / they are gone to feed the roses.) — the rosie probert scene in “under milk wood”, dylan thomas (remember her. / she is forgetting. / the earth which filled her mouth / is vanishing from her.) — “do not go gentle into that good night”, dylan thomas (old age should burn and rave at close of day; / rage, rage against the dying of the light) — “a quoi bon dire?”, charlotte mew (and everybody thinks that you are dead, / but i.) — “myth”, natasha trethewey (you’ll be dead again tomorrow, / but in dreams you live. so i try taking / you back into morning.) — “i watched you disappear”, anya krugovoy silver (are you there? where? / are the others there, too?) — “i am asking you to come back home”, jo carson (my mamma used to say she could feel herself / runnin' short of the breath of life. so can i. / and i am blessed tired of buryin' things i love.) — “the night where you no longer live”, meghan o’rourke (was there gas station food / and was it a long trip) — “condolence”, dorothy parker (but i had smiled to think how you, the dead, / so curiously preoccupied and grave, / would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.) — “death at daybreak”, anne reeve aldrich (i shall pass dawn on her way to earth, / as i seek for a path through space.) — “fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, william shakespeare (golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.) — “sonnet xciv”, pablo neruda (don’t call up my person. i am absent. / live in my absence as if in a house.) — “funeral blues”, w. h. auden (the stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, / pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood) — “the drowned children”, louise glück (but death must come to them differently, / so close to the beginning.) — “because i could not stop for death”, emily dickinson (the carriage held but just ourselves – / and immortality.)

[sorryabout-theblood]

Short Stories I Really Enjoy, Part 1

It's Real Meat!

Open House on Haunted Hill

Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds

The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time

From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7

The Abduction of Europa

On the Banks of the River Lex

Scattered Along the River of Heaven

Signals in the Deep

[guccifloralsuits]

gimme classic recs!! I want them, i love romance and like gothic stuff, so think jane eyre, frankenstein, and picture of dorian gray type stuff!🤸‍♀️🐛💞

Hmmmmm. Based on my own reading, I’d say:

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Prequel to Jane Eyre, from the POV of Antoinette aka Mr. Rochester's wife. It’s a modernist era work, but very interesting intersection in my opinion. Short, but definitely not ‘light reading’ ngl)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis

Dracula by Bram Stoker (I mean I had to include this don’t @ me hhghghgjhgj)

*If you’re a fan of Oscar Wilde’s writing style specifically, and are interested in his life, I would rec reading De Profundis—it’s a 50k length letter written by Wilde to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas while imprisoned for “gross indecency” (being homosexual), and it’s deeply philosophical, complex, intense, (and in my opinion, one of the best love letters ever written)

[melyzard]

This online book shop is trying to dethrone Amazon by siphoning its revenue to indie bookstores

I’ve been diligent about buying books locally this year, particularly during the pandemic, which has been grueling on brick-and-mortar stores. But it’s a commitment that’s required patience, if I’m being real. When I recently ordered a few books…

I just discovered this site, and it has everything I’ve been looking for but haven’t wanted to buy on Amazon!! I’m making a wishlist and sending it to my fam for the holidays. One note: I found that often when I typed in a title, it would return with no results, but if I typed in the author, then the title it said wasn’t in the catalogue showed up after all. So if you’re looking for a specific book and it doesn’t show up, try searching for the author instead. So the search algorithm maybe isn’t great, but hey, the catalogue is huge and I’m pretty sure the owners aren’t hiring actual Pinkerton thugs to beat up their workers like Amazon.

[of-foolish-and-wise]

mega-list of book recommendations

saw a mega-list of literary recommendations going around recently and was struck by the dearth of titles by poc, so i made a list of just poc titles to course-correct. keep in mind that i can only in good faith recommend what i’ve read, so i’m sure i’ve absolutely missed some integral titles. drop me an inbox message if you have more recs, i’m always open

canonical

the narrative of frederick douglass - frederick douglass

incidents in the life of a slave girl - harriet jacobs

the souls of black folk - w.e.b. dubois

montage of a dream deferred - langston hughes

cane - jean toomer

their eyes were watching god - zora neale hurston

the bean eaters - gwendolyn brooks

a raisin in the sun - lorraine hansberry

invisible man - ralph ellison

native son - richard wright

the autobiography of malcolm x - malcolm x

the fire next time - james baldwin

sister outsider: essays and speeches - audre lorde

things fall apart - chinua achebe

the garden of forking paths - jorge luis borges

one hundred years of solitude - gabriel garcia marquez

the color purple - alice walker

the woman warrior - maxine hong kingston

satanic verses - salman rushdie

beloved - toni morrison

sula - toni morrison

the house on mango street - sandra cisneros

the joy luck club - amy tan

DAMN. - kendrick lamar

plays

a tempest - aime cesaire

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf - ntozake shange

fences - august wilson

dutchman - amiri baraka

the american play - suzan-lori parks

memoir

the light of the world - elizabeth alexander

how we fight for our lives - saeed jones

between the world and me - ta-nehisi coates

persepolis - marjane satrapi

men we reaped - jesmyn ward

heavy - kiese laymon

black boy - richard wright

the yellow house - sarah m broom

brothers and keepers - john edgar wideman

zami: a new spelling of my name - audre lorde

poetry

american sonnet for my past and future assassin - terrance hayes

the tradition - jericho brown

night sky with exit wounds - ocean vuong

citizen: an american lyric - claudia rankine

twenty love poems and a song of despair - pablo neruda

don’t call us dead - danez smith

eye level - jenny xie

life on mars - tracy k smith

a fortune for your disaster - hanif abdurraqib

postcolonial love poem - natalie diaz

i can’t talk about the trees without the blood - tiana clark

i wore my blackest hair - carlina duan

an american sunrise - joy harjo

oculus - sally wen mao

short stories

her body & other stories - carmen maria machado

interpreter of maladies - jhumpa lahiri

exhalation - ted chiang

ficciones - jorge louis borges

what is not yours is not yours - helen oyeyemi

sour heart - jenny zhang

essays

how to write an autobiographical novel: essays - alexander chee

trick mirror - jia tolentino

bad feminist - roxane gay

they can’t kill us until they kill us - hanif abdurraqib

we were eight years in power: an american tragedy - ta-nehisi coates

borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza - gloria anzaldua

this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color - ed. cherrie moraga and gloria anzaldua

white girls - hilton als

non-fiction

the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the era of colorblindness - michelle alexander

stamped from the beginning: the definitive history of racist ideas in america - ibram x kendi

bunk: the rise of hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news - kevin young

an alchemy of race and rights - patricia j williams

looking for lorraine: the radiant and radical life of lorraine hansberry - imani perry

the next billion users: digital life beyond the west - payal arora

fiction

passing - nella larson

caucasia - danzy senna

trust exercise - susan choi

on earth we’re briefly gorgeous - ocean vuong

corregidora - gayl jones

the fifth season - nk jemisin

the brief wondrous life of oscar wao - junot diaz

the round house - louise erdrich

there, there - tommy orange

little fires everywhere - celeste ng

the supervisor - viet than nguyen

kindred - octavia butler

the known world - edward p jones

the underground railroad - colson whitehead

the god of small things - arundhati roy

the vegetarian - han king

theory

playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination - toni morrison

black skin, white masks - frantz fanon

mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book - hortense spillers

discourse on colonialism - aime cesaire

scenes of subjection - saidiya hartman

the signifyin(g) monkey - henry louis gates jr

pedagogy of the oppressed - paulo freire

feminist theory: from margin to center - bell hooks

black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america - tricia rose

decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in african literature - ngũgĩ wa thiong’o

black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition - cedric robinson

black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment - patricia hill collins

black and blur (consent not to be a single thing) - fred moten

young adult

diary of a part-time indian - sherman alexei

the hate u give - angie thomas

emergency contact - mary hk choi

i am not your perfect mexican daughter - erika sanchez

poet x - elizabeth avecedo