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Anne Michaels, from "Infinite Gradation," originally published in October 2017

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so like are we just doomed to think we are ugly and then look back on ourselves in that moment and think we were actually beautiful and it just carry on in an endless cycle

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“The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down tigers or hiccups to cure us of our recklessness. The effort was doomed, for it too much pointed past the intimate boundaries of our necessary fictions.”

— Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City

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‘Young Woman with a Bouquet of Roses’ by François Boucher, 18th century 

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if you start reading books again. you will feel at least a little better. I promise

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the far left guy realised that he should've started a week ago

the second fella is revising the material... too bad he's still going to fail

the third guy is really in his "to be or not to be" era, probably in more ways than one.

the forth guy, far right, is the one that gave the cigarette to the far left guy, thinking to himself "at least im not going to fail this bitch by myself"

The Night before the Exam by Leonid Pasternak, 1895

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Best books you've read written by women? I hate reading stuff written by men lately...

Fiction(ish)

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Paris, When It's Naked, Etel Adnan

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

The Doll's Alphabet, Camilla Grudova

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

The People in the Room, Norah Lange

Água Viva, Clarice Lispector

Collected Stories, Clarice Lispector

The Empty Book, Josefina Vicens

Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Waves and Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Non-Fiction:

Second-hand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Living, Thinking, Looking, Siri Hustvedt

Feel Free: Essays, Zadie Smith

The Need for Roots, Simone Weil

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Little Weirds, Jenny Slate

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Poetry:

The War Works Hard, Dunya Mikhail

Barefoot Souls and A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor, Maram al-Masri

Tell Me and Wild Nights, Kim Addonizio

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

What We Carry, Dorianne Laux

Extracting the Stone of Madness, Alejandra Pizarnik

Poppies in Translation, Sujata Bhatt

The Neverfield: A Poem, Nathalie Handal

Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women

View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska

The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde

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That post I made over new years had people at my THROAT for saying I only buy real leather. Sorry I really do think that wearing textured plastic that will fall apart in under 5 years and go on to irreparably poison the environment is the worse option here.

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So, when my grandpa died my mom got all of his books. Some of the books in his appartement were my uncles and he gave me bunch of them (mostly because he didn't care for them, he only took the one Harry Potter book he had)

One of the books he gave me caught my eye, mostly because it was bright pink and you couldn't miss it. i picked it up and it read "Bringing Up Girls in Bohemia"("Odgoj djevojaka u Češkoj") by Michal Viewegh.

It's a short novel and it pulls you in with humour and satire, mixed with comments of the state of the then Czech society in the light of introduction of capitalism and political relationships. School and family upbringing are on the verge of collapse, new tycoons dictate the rules and the younger population seeks to find their place in society.

So yes you should reject booktok and embrace "this looks short and weird" and read the book in one afternoon

reject booktok culture. go to the library and get a weird little novel you’ve never heard of in your life and read it all in 2 days like god intended.

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As someone who is studying history with a big interest in 1940-1980, it is insane to see the crack down on the college protests. History does nothing but repeat itself. It happened with protests against segregation, against the Vietnam War, against the Iraq war… and how we view it looking back is always the same. People always ask why studying history is important. This is exactly why.

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visual by zayn alarbi, words by ibrahim nasrallah

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“I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath; "Three Women,"

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A PALESTINIAN CITIZEN AND HIS DOG FROM GAZA RAISES THE VICTORY SIGN FROM INSIDE HIS DESTROYED HOME. X

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Julia de Burgos, tr. by Jack Agüeros, from Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos; "To Julia de Burgos"

[Text ID: "in all my poems I undress my heart."]

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body paintings by Karen Turner