There is something about mazes and labyrinths that fascinates me – the sense of mystery while you’re solving a carefully constructed puzzle, the darkness enveloping you more and more as you wander its paths… And I am not alone in this. Many authors have used labyrinths as the setting for their stories, and some have taken it even one step further, creating abstract labyrinths that only exist in the mind.
In honour of Galentine’s Day (what’s Galentine’s Day? Oh, it’s only the best day of the year!), I decided to focus on a topic that is overlooked far too often in fiction: friendship between women. We all know about the Bechdel test, but try putting together a list of books where female friendship is the focus of the story, I dare you. Bonus points if the women in question are not related. It is practically impossible! That said, here are some of my favourite fictional examples of female friendship – the good and the bad. Some of these duos are attached at the hip for life, whereas other relationships go sour in the worst possible way.
If you can think of more titles, please leave a comment!
After my reviews of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (here) and On Beauty by Zadie Smith (here), I decided to dedicate a full post to postcolonial rewritings and reworkings of the Western literary canon.
These are some works that I could think of off the top of my head, but if there are any more out there that I should know about, please let me know in the comments!
The space next to me bristles with silence. The emptiness is palpable. Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence next to me.
Trumpet, Jackie Kay.
A list of works of literature about death, grief, and mourning (including poetry, plays, memoirs, and a graphic novel).
One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, - A natural perspective, that is and is not! […] How have you made division of yourself? An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin Than these two creatures.
The trickster is an archetype that appeared in the myths of many different cultures and is still popular with many writers today. These characters are rule-breakers and agents of chaos; they are often animals (e.g. foxes, crows, coyotes), travellers, or even shapeshifters able to cross boundaries between worlds. For this reason they sometimes function as a guide or messenger, like the Greek god Hermes). Characteristically, the trickster is clever and creative. They generally lie to obtain sex, food, or just to get out of something they don’t want to do, using their wit to outsmart of the Man/the Establishment/the gods/what have you.
Since they are so unpredictable and paradoxical, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what the perfect definition of a trickster is. As Lewis Hyde puts it in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art:
[The] best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found – sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.
How Much of These Hills is Gold, C. Pam Zhang: In my opinion, a contemporary classic. Weaves Chinese myth with stories of the American Gold Rush. Beautiful prose and valuable takeaways re: family, truth, and gender.
A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib: Essay upon essay of mind-plowing poetics and storytelling. Hanif’s version of Baldwin’s Devil Finds Work. A wide swath of topics from blackface to spades to magic.
Writers & Lovers, Lily King: Came to me at the exact right (or wrong?) time, just when my father passed away. A keenly-observed novel about grief and persona that is something like if SweetbittermetNormal People.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee: Inspired me to get over myself and just start writing again. The essay on roses absolutely floored me.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman: Hard to stomach, but necessary. Foundational for the way I am thinking about neo-slave narratives and speculative historical fiction.
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke: The minute I read this, I added it to the syllabus for my class on women in isolation. Part graphic novel, part longform essay, part research paper, and wholly extraordinary.
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Jennifer Lynn Stoever: This one’s just for me. The burning core at the center of my reading list and the inspiration and model for my scholarship.
The Street, Ann Petry: Read it because of the book above, but an absolute banger of a book. Devastating ending. Would be extraordinary taught alongside Native Son.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin: This book has everything. Polyamory. Earth-bending. An alien creature frozen inside a giant piece of rock in the middle of the ocean. Love this woman, love seeing Blackness-as-default in sci-fi novels.
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel: You read it in high school for a good reason. A true exemplar of the genre and a fascinating way to teach non-chronological storytelling.
rest below the cut
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
Brothers & Keepers, John Edgar Wideman
Bunk: The True Story of Hoaxes, Hucksters, Humbug, Plagiarists, Forgeries, and Phonies, Kevin Young
Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas
Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Tomi Adeyemi
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Mary Ann Doane
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Ben Blatt
Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, Brian Hochman
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
People We Meet on Vacation, Emily Henry
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue, Mackenzi Lee
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Legendborn, Tracy Deonn
Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, Christina Lauren
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Nina Sun Eidsheim
One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston
One to Watch, Kate Stayman-London
Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Amy Lawrence
An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole
It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble
Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination, Susan J. Douglass
How to Fail at Flirting, Denise Williams
The Flat-Share, Beth O'Leary
Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Michele Hilmes
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud
Books I have read and will proceed to recommend to you
Here’s a big ol reading list of the books that I have read or reread most recently. Check em out, maybe you’ll find something you like!
NONFICTION
Conversations with an Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski— this is the only holocaust book I’ve ever reread. It’s a meticulously compiled and edited transcription of Kazimierz Moczarski’s “interviews” (they were confined to the same prison cell) with the odious ex-SS-Polizeigeneral Jürgen Stroop. Stroop rose from ordinary beginnings in the sleepy German state of Lippe-Detmold to become the man Hitler personally trusted to destroy the Warsaw Ghetto, and he would mercilessly crush the Jewish uprising there in 1943. The book is an unflinching and often horrifying look at how ordinary people become Nazis and go on to commit acts of unspeakable evil. Yet, it’s oddly inspiring in Stroop’s awed and disbelieving descriptions of the pure bravery and strength of the Ghetto fighters, which ran against everything he had been conditioned to believe about Jews.
October, by China Miéville— a well-written and compelling narrative history of the October Revolution, tracing it from the first stirrings of revolt to the formation of the Bolshevik government. Miéville writes stridently and from an unabashedly socialist perspective. The book inspires with its stories of courage, struggle, and triumph, but does not shy away from the uncertainty and power-wrangling involved in the formation of the revolutionary government. It ends by acknowledging the mistakes of the USSR and urging the readers to dream better and do better in what the author believes will be the inevitable next revolution.
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, by Jason Moore and Raj Patel— this is an interesting and thought-provoking look at the development of global imperialist capitalism, through the framing device of narrating the Spanish conquest of South and Central America. The “seven cheap things” the authors discuss (nature, work, money, care, food, energy, and lives) both served and serve to underpin our modern system. In many ways, they demonstrate, nothing has fundamentally changed from the most brutal days of colonialism to now.
What Is to Be Done?, by Vladimir Illych Lenin— astrident and practical revolutionary text that lays out Lenin’s disagreements with certain wrong-headed ideological tendencies in inimitable style. Along the way, it lays out a series of workable ideas and blueprints for a revolutionary movement, from organization to propaganda to security. Really, just read this one.
The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home, by Jonathan Kozol— this obscure but fascinating text, now long since out of print, came to me recommended in the highest terms. With the cold and furious precision of an angry surgeon, Kozol dissects the ways in which the North American education system crushes our dissenting tendencies and moulds us into proper capitalist citizens. We find ourselves, after twelve years, fully detached from the violence and exploitation on which our lives are built (even more so if one becomes an academic) unwilling to question the evil of our system, cut off, in many ways, from our own humanity. This is not a typical critique of the education system— it is nothing less than a polemic against the ways in which all of us go about our lives, viewed from the system that shaped the way we live and construct our selves.
Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism, by Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg— originally published in French, this book is composed largely of edited interviews with aging Jewish radicals living either in Israel or France. It is very much a portal into a world not so much vanished as hidden, disposed of by western Jews eager to prove their anti-communist credentials. The stories of revolt and underground political activity, the vibrant history of both secular and religious Jewish leftism— all are inspiring. However, the tale ends with sadness and defeat, as the Jews of the book find themselves betrayed by the USSR, and make their way to an Israel they have no choice but to come to terms with. In writing, the authors say they wish to help the young Jews of today dream of a Jewish future beyond the dead Zionism that dominates our culture, a future in which the oppressed of the world will find true freedom. I hope it helps you dream, and I hope that dream gets put to work.
FICTION
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair— you have of course heard of this one. A classic work of realist fiction, it tells the brutal story of an immigrant family literally ground to pieces by the uncaring evil of capitalism. This story is still being played out, every day, far from our eyes. Read it.
Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich, by Stephen Leacock— Leacock is one of the most famous Canadian humorists of the 20th century, best known for his charming satirical look at small-town Ontario life in the 1910s, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. This,itssequel/companion volume, dials up the satire and back the charm in its vicious and biting dissection of the moneyed class in an unnamed American large city. From religion, to politics, to social occasions and romance, no aspect of upper-class life is not skewered, and the satires ring just as true today.
Dispatches, by Michael Herr— afrankly hallucinatory ride through the worst and most absurd of the Vietnam War, this “semi-fictional” half-memoir is best read as a cry against the American imperial war machine and the suffering it causes. Embedded with the troops as a journalist for Esquire magazine, Herr writes what he saw, felt, and experienced, and the result is hard to put down. An admittedly American-centric exploration of the lives destroyed by imperial adventures.
That’s that for now! Happy reading, if you decide to pick up any of these.
Today as Scotland votes on independence, peruse this reading list of Scottish favorites to learn more about the country’s history, politics, and culture.
disclaimer: all of these works are fiction i am in no way saying this is what the members are like, also my old pieces of work are really bad and i will be rewriting them at some point.
In honour of Black History Month, we’ve put together a list of some of our favourite books by Black British women. It’s important to remember as Irenosen Okojie wrote in The Guardian that there’s more to Black British literature than Zadie Smith.
andrea gibson’s maybe i need you (spoken word that will take your breath away “tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneath”)
