#lolita tony

[love-marimo]

LOOK AT HIM!!!!!

[feastofsnakes]

The Carnivorous Lamb / Go Tell It on the Mountain / Sula / Mathilda / The Gospel Singer / Lolita

Books starting after it's too late

[yes-i-am-happyaspie]

Commissions are OPEN!!

Link to my carrd -> [Here]

'Keep reading' to view a small (chibi) gallery!

[tony-pepperony]

CONCEPT.

Alt fashion meetup/ neighborhood cleanup

Pros:

-we're doing neighborhood cleanup, so there's less trash on the ground

-opportunity to meet more alt people and discuss alt things like music and fashion and other subculture stuff

-alt fashion draws attention by default. People will Notice, possibly even ask what's going on, so we can be like "we're picking up trash in the neighborhood :)" and it'll give people a more positive impression of alt communities that they may not have had before plus bring awareness to the litter problem in the area

-an opportunity to talk to people who are equally as passionate about these topics as I am

Cons:

-somebody has to organize it (I don't know how to do that)

[mtonino]

Side by Side

Lolita (1997) Adrian Lyne

Detachment (2011) Tony Kaye

Lolita 1997

Detachment 2011

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast. The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time. The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein, and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct toward women, just days before the election. The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship between two former friends and their very different paths: One toward infamy, prison and suicide; the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star. Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.” The tapes also offer unusual insight into the friendship of two wealthy, powerful men who frequently went out on the town together, prowling for women in New York and Atlantic City. [...]

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap. Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who was also the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has long attracted praise and bromides. When Fire & Fury was published in January 2018, Trump tried to stop it with a failed cease and desist order, then threatened to sue. No case ever materialized, and it sold 5 million copies worldwide. Wolff, who appears regularly on his Fire and Fury podcast, wrote two more books on Trump after Fire and Fury, and about Epstein in 2021’s Too Famous.

Wolff says he has up to 100 hours of recordings of interviews with Epstein, including from using him as a source for Fire and Fury, and from years of meetings when the disgraced financier appeared to want Wolff to write a biography of him. Wolff said he decided to release parts of the archive after a new accuser, a former Miss Switzerland, alleged last week that Trump had groped her in 1992.

[...] Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, which spanned the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s has been well documented. In the 1990s, the two publicly partied at Mar-a-Lago and went to a Victoria’s Secret Angels show together. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine of Epstein, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein’s infamous leaked addressbooks had Trump’s own phone number as well as Melania’s, while Trump’s name appeared seven times in the passenger logs of Epstein’s planes. (The books and logs also included princes, politicians and potentates such as Bill Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew and celebrities and billionaires including Mick Jagger and Les Wexner.)

[...] In 2022 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who procured him underage girls, would be sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for the sex trafficking of minors. Upon hearing of her arrest in 2020, Trump, then president, said he wished her well. “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. Yeah, I wish her well… Good luck.” In 2004, Epstein and Trump fell out when they both tried to buy a Palm Beach estate, Maison de L’Amitié, out of bankruptcy. The next year, the FBI began investigating Epstein for child sex trafficking.

In 2019, on the day after Epstein’s arrest, Trump said in the Oval Office, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” and that they had not been friends for 15 years. He said it “did not much matter” what the fall-out had been over. This September, asked about Epstein by the tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Trump said: “He was a good salesman. He was a hailing, hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.”

[...]

The Epstein tape includes an allegation—which is impossible to verify—that Trump had an affair with a politician while in the White House. Epstein offered no proof or sourcing for the claim. He also alleged that Trump cheated on both his first wife Ivana and second wife Marla Maples with “a Black girl.” At one section, Epstein used a Yiddish racial slur to refer to Black women and alleged Trump boasted to him, “I’m f---ing all these Black women.” The tape mixes sexual allegations with other aspects of Trump’s life. Early in the recording Epstein is heard to say, “You probably know he had a scalp reduction. He’s getting the same male pattern baldness that we all have. He had his scalp reduced. It’s hysterical.” Trump has long refused to release full medical records while his White House medical reports did not disclose any prior surgeries.

“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming. To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---”

— Epstein on Trump

And Epstein offers his eyewitness account of Trump Tower and Trump’s office where, he said, Trump had “fake honors” on the wall. Trump, he claimed, would yell at his personal assistant Rhona Graff, “who’s a loyal, perfect, secretary,” as well as Matthew Calamari Snr., his bodyguard, and Michael Cohen, his attorney who is now an enemy. Epstein compared Trump to “an emotionally challenged 9-year-old,” and said, “He screams and yells at Rhona more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum, not a temper. If you don’t understand him, it’s frightening. Once you understand him, it’s sort of silly.” Epstein also told Wolff he had positive things to say about Trump. “He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming,” he said. “To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---. He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes it on board.” He added that he had a “self-deprecating nature” and was “not vulgar.” “He’s funny,” Epstein said. “Self-awareness means you’re self-aware. He’s aware of that person, Donald Trump. He talks about The Trump, The Trumpster. ‘Trump’s getting laid.’”

On the tape Epstein, speaking in a New York accent, also mentioned the rich and powerful. (In a deposition released after his death Epstein admitted under oath that he dropped the names of people he had never met.) The names he mentioned on tape include: Former president Bill Clinton; Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; then-Defense Secretary James Mattis; and the billionaires Carl Icahn and Tom Barrack, both of whom are friends of Trump. Clinton was a long-standing friend of Epstein but has denied any association after the pedophile’s disgrace in the mid-2000s. Mattis has no known association with him. Ivanka was photographed with him as a child but Kushner has never been known to be linked to him. Barrack appeared in a leaked appointment diary for Epstein from 2016, while Carl Icahn, a corporate raider and long-time Trump friend, was in Epstein’s 1997 address book. Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling Wolff, “The moral compass just does not exist.”

The Daily Beast reported that Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump's closest friend for about 10 years, according to tapes obtained from the outlet that featured Michael Wolff interviewing the late pedophile.

[medievalanchoress]

Hi, if you ever feel up to it, I'd love to see a books recs post from you! ✨️

without ruminating too much on it, off the top of my head, my top five authors are:

-Virginia Woolf (The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando). if you’re having trouble getting into her work, begin with A Room of One’s Own.

-Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way). an absolute must-read at some point in one’s life and i hope to one day reread the first four volumes of La Recherche and make it to the seventh!

-Elena Ferrante (The Neapolitan Quartet, The Days of Abandonment). if you enjoyed My Brilliant Friend (or even the tv series), i’d highly recommend reading her collection of essays, Frantumaglia, too.

-Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin, Pale Fire, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading; Speak, Memory).

-Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Home, Lila, Gilead). an American author who writes in spare, beautiful prose with a theological underpinning; the first book here broke my heart while the last three books listed form a trio of sorts, an expanded rumination on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. 

beyond the above list, many of my favorite books from high school still feel fresh: Sula by Toni Morrison, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast, as well as the iconic sad girl books that i think are damn well-written: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath & The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. 

my favorite classics include Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, My Ántonia by Willa Cather, Kafka's selected short stories, Aeschylus' Oresteia, and, of course, Homer's Iliad + Odyssey (trans. by Fagles). i’m not super up to date on contemporary novelists but i like include John Banville (The Sea), Michale Ondaatje (The English Patient, Cat's Table), and Donna Tart (for her fashion sense, reclusive lifestyle, and The Goldfinch & The Secret History obviously). Rachel Cusk's work is also dryly witty and good. finally, i have a soft spot for well-written memoir; it's a genre that gets put down sometimes but Lit by Mary Karr, Firebird by Mark Doty, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (btw i highly recommend her fiction too) saved my life in small but meaningful ways. 

well, this answer is itself fast approaching a novel, so i will end by saying, if anyone would like a book rec, tell me a few books you like or what you’re in the mood for and i’ll try to come up with a reply. 😌

xxx Ana 💫

[woundthatswallows]

Do you have any book recs

always!! my personal favorites are

- the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson

- frankenstein by mary shelley

- the carnivorous lamb by agustín gómez-arcos

- rebecca by daphne du maurier

- the diary of anaïs nin vol 1 1931-1934

- someone who isn't me by geoff rickly

- paradise rot by jenny hval

- beautiful losers by leonard cohen

- the piano teacher by elfriede jelinek

- lolita by vladimir nabokov

- angels in america by tony kushner

- veronica by mary gaitskill

-a spy in the house of love by anaïs nin

-we have always lived in this castle by shirley jackson

im currently obsessed w anne rice's vampire chronicles at the moment, currently on queen of the damned but i think i'll take a pause and read some other stuff after this one

recently read and enjoyed out of time by paula martinac. lesbians and ghosts and ghosts lesbians and time travel? very atmospheric, critical moments happen in antique stores...

[companion-showdown]

Family Feud Nominations, Who is the Best Doctor Who Family

If I've missed a character out of one of the families let me know (within reason, I imagine all these families are massive in the EU, so prioritise tv or significant characters)

Currently, the only rule is no families may inculde anyone who is even ambiguously The Doctor, it'll get super complicated super fast imo

Any characters, eg River, who can link up multiple different families to create a single massive family unit will be treated on a case by case basis. If it is possible to pick one of the smaller family units that they are a part of to include them in while not including them in any of the others (in a way everyone will agree at least makes sense) they will be included in that family only, otherwise they will not be included

Please bare in mind when you are nominating that I am hoping to keep the number of nominations under 64 to run this as a mini-tournament. This is not a hard rule so if nominations do exceed 64 its not a big deal, just something I'd like everyone to bare in mind

Nominees

Foreman-Campbell (Susan, David, Alex)

Chesterton-Wright (Ian, Barbara, implied to be married after they leave)

McCrimmon (Jamie, Heather, V.M.McCrimmon, various others)

Waterfield (Victoria, Edward (father))

Lethbridge-Stewart (Kate, The Brigadier, Doris (Brig's wife in Battlefield), Archibald Hamish (TUAT), Gordon (Kate's son in Downtime), Kadiatu, The Great Intelligence, Lucy Wilson)

Grant/Jones (Jo, Cliff, Santiago (Jo's grandson in Death of the Doctor))

Smith (Sarah-Jane, Lavinia (aunt), Brendan Richards, Luke, Sky, Mr Smith, K9 (they are her family and I will not be hearing otherwise), Barbara, Eddie (parents in Temptation of Sarah-Jane Smith))

Leela, Andred, Veega, Rayo

Adric and Varsh (brothers)

Nyssa, Tremas, and Kassia (daughter, father, step-mother)

Jovanka (Tegan, Vanessa (aunt in Logopolis), Colin (cousin in Arc of Infinity))

Turlough (Vislor, Malkon (brother in Planet of Fire))

McShane (Ace, Audrey (mother), Kathleen (grandmother), Liam (brother))

Tyler (Rose, Jackie, Pete, Tony (baby mentioned in Journey's End), no I will not be adding the metacrisis to this list)

Another Smith (Mickey, Rita (grandmother))

Slitheen

Harkness (Jack, Grey, parents, Alice Carter (daughter), Steven Carter(grandson))

Isolas (Fear Her)

Jones (Martha, Francine, Clive, Tish, Leo, Leo has a baby as well, Adeola Oshodi)

The Family of Blood

Redfern-Smith (Joan, John (various), possible dream children and grandchildren)

Shafe Kanes (from Utopia, Kristane, Beltone)

Mott-Noble-Temple (Donna, Sylvia, Wilf, Shaun, Rose)

The Adipose

Pond-Williams (Amy, Rory, River, Brian, Anthony, Amy's aunt and parents)

Owens: (Craig, Sophie, Stormageddon Dark Lord of All)

Gillyflower (Mrs Gillyflower, Ada)

Paternoster (Jenny, Vastra, Strax)

Oswald (Clara, Ellie, Dave (parents), grandmother, and I'm going to say Danny makes the cut, Orson)

Potts (Bill, Mother, Moira (foster mother))

O'Brien-Sinclair (Graham, Ryan, Grace, Aaron (Ryan's father))

Khan (Yaz, Najia (mother), Hakim (father), Sonya (sister), Umbreen (grandmother))

Lewis (Dan, Eileen (mother), Neville (father))

Swarm and Azure

Bel, Vinder and their as yet unborn child

Sunday (Ruby, Carla, Cherry, many many foster siblings)

The TARDIS and Lolita

Little House of Cwej

The House of Lungbarrow (Grandfater Paradox, Qenceus, Inocet, various cousins, Irving Braxiatel, Maggie Matsumoto, Ulysses, Penelope GAte, Anna Joyce)

The House of Dvora (Morbius, The War King, Thessalia, Romana, various others)

Langer (Clyde, Carla (mother), Paul (father))

Jackson (Maria, Alan, Chrissie)

Chandra (Rani, Haresh, Gita)

The Wu Diaspora (Cindy Wu and her clones)

Munmeth and Mutmunna (Medicine Man)

Ada and Alice Obiefune

Who (Susan, Barbara, Louise)

Jones-Davies (Ianto, Rhiannon, Johnny, David, Mica)

Summerfield (Bernice, Issac, Claire, Jason Kane, Peter, Wolsey, Keith, Rebecca, Cousin Eliza, Benedict I-IV, Christine)

Miller (Lucie, Pat (aunt))

Schofield (Hex, Cassie, Hilda)

House of Witforge (Narvin, Lenaris, Helico, Narvin's father, Rexin)

Faction Paradox

Pollard (Charley, Louisa, Richard, Margaret, Edward Grove, The Sound Creature)

Mesh Cos, Lon Shel, Julian White Mammoth Tusk

Cooper-Williams (Gwen, Rhys, Anwen, Geraint, Mary (Gwen's parents))

Chenka (Liv, Tula, Kal, Garlon Rosh)

Sinclair (Helen, Albie, Trev Bailey)

Forrester

Proctor (Cleo, Jordan, parents)

Nominations will be open until Midday Friday (03/05, 12:00 BST (GMT/UTC +1)), I will try and give a more specific time then

[filmnoirsbian]

Do you have any recommendations for books with unreliable narrators? I want to write a novel with an unreliable narrator eventually but am really only aware of films with unreliable narrators so I want to see how it's done in novel form haha 🌻🌻

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, Jazz by Toni Morrison, Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup, Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

[symptomofloves]

2023 faves

albums:

joanna newsom's entire discography <3

no thank you (2022) by little simz

the land is inhospitable & so are we (2023) by mitski

the record (2023) by boygenius

bewitched (2023) by laufey

books:

the waves (1931) by virginia woolf

lolita (1955) by vladimir nabokov

the dispossessed (1974) by ursula k. le guin

just above my head (1978) by james baldwin

beloved (1987) by toni morrison

movies:

bicycle thieves (1948) dir. vittorio de sica

late spring (1949) dir. yasujiro ozu

secrets & lies (1996) dir. mike leigh

aftersun (2022) dir. charlotte wells

past lives (2023) dir. celine song

*honorable mention to about elly (2009) dir. asghar farhadi

tagging 23 mutuals for 2023, but feel free to do this whether i tagged u or not :)

@bichopalo, @bymine, @cartoonpeoplemp3, @cheruib, @clementineoil, @engulfes, @imkindatheman, @lesbianjonimitchell, @lynchiangf, @marusyenka, @mothprincess, @motifcollector, @mumintroll, @murderballadeer, @nevergoesout, @sapokanikan, @schalotte, @something2believe, @soulmvtes, @vlindervin7, @weyesbloodgf, @weirdgirlification, @zaubermaerchen

[13eyond13]

How many of these "Top 100 Books to Read" have you read?

(633) 1984 - George Orwell

(616) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

(613) The Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger

(573) Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(550) Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

(549) The Adventures Of Tom And Huck - Series - Mark Twain

(538) Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

(534) One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(527) To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

(521) The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck

(521) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

(492) Pride And Prejudice - Jane Austen

(489) The Lord Of The Rings - Series - J.R.R. Tolkien

(488) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

(480) Ulysses - James Joyce

(471) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

(459) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

(398) The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(396) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

(395) To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

(382) War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy

(382) The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

(380) The Sound And The Fury - William Faulkner

(378) Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Series - Lewis Carroll

(359) Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

(353) Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

(352) Middlemarch - George Eliot

(348) Animal Farm - George Orwell

(346) Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

(334) Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

(325) Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

(320) Harry Potter - Series - J.K. Rowling

(320) The Chronicles Of Narnia - Series - C.S. Lewis

(317) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

(308) Lord Of The Flies - William Golding

(306) Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

(289) The Golden Bowl - Henry James

(276) Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

(266) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

(260) The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

(255) The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Series - Douglas Adams

(252) The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne

(244) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

(237) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery

(235) The Trial - Franz Kafka

(233) Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

(232) The Call Of The Wild - Jack London

(232) Emma - Jane Austen

(229) Beloved - Toni Morrison

(228) Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

(224) A Passage To India - E.M. Forster

(215) Dune - Frank Herbert

(215) A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - James Joyce

(212) The Stranger - Albert Camus

(209) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

(209) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(206) Dracula - Bram Stoker

(205) The Picture Of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

(197) A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

(193) Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

(193) The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton

(193) The History Of Tom Jones, A Foundling - Henry Fielding

(192) Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry

(190) The Odyssey - Homer

(189) Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

(188) In Search Of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

(186) Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

(185) An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

(182) The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

(180) Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

(179) The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

(178) Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

(178) Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller

(176) The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

(176) On The Road - Jack Kerouac

(175) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(173) The Giver - Lois Lowry

(172) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

(172) A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

(171) Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

(171) The Ambassadors - Henry James

(170) Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

(167) The Complete Stories And Poems - Edgar Allen Poe

(166) Ender's Saga - Series - Orson Scott Card

(165) In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

(164) The Wings Of The Dove - Henry James

(163) The Adventures Of Augie March - Saul Bellow

(162) As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

(161) The Hunger Games - Series - Suzanne Collins

(158) Anne Of Greene Gables - L.M. Montgomery

(157) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

(157) Neuromancer - William Gibson

(156) The Help - Kathryn Stockett

(156) A Song Of Ice And Fire - George R.R. Martin

(155) The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

(154) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

(153) I, Claudius - Robert Graves

(152) Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

(151) The Portrait Of A Lady - Henry James

(150) The Death Of The Heart - Elizabeth Bowen

[candiedspit]

It was not the first time I’d considered death as an escape hatch. Nor was it the first time I felt my head was not my own, not in my control. Once, after a vicious fight with my mother I went to the golf course in the neighborhood, houses on either side, blonde patios and a long stretch of grass, and drank a bottle of cough syrup. I laughed into my hands, I laughed out loud and took an Uber to the supermarket. I sat in the front and felt as though the driver knew how special I was, the mission I’d been granted, wanted to fuck the powers out of me, suck my light. But he dropped me off and I went inside, ate a candy bar without paying and ignored the phone calls. When my brother appeared, he asked if I was alright. I was gone, not Jasmine at all. But a puppet carried by someone with restless hands. I experienced depression first at eleven years old. I would want to sleep all the time, asked for sleep on my birthday; I couldn’t focus in school, limped through my classes and said not very much. This came and went, once resulting in taking a bottle of aspirin then laying on the couch and telling no one what I’d done, nursing a stomach ache. But at sixteen years old, a girl raised on Lolita and Arctic Monkeys, vinyl records and poems, I had my first manic episode. I have only bits of recollection. I know the broader scope; I wore loud clothing, hung out of cars, was convinced I was either going to win a Tony award because of the music I was planning to write or, if that didn’t work out, an Emmy for my film I was in the process of making. I had hired two young girls, gotten permission from the library to film inside, had written the script—but I had no camera. Still, I would mumble beneath my sheets at night, rehearsing my acceptance speech over and over again. Thank you so much. This is an honor, really. More episodes would follow; seven years would pass punctured by episodes, long stretches of being king, a couple of dark holes. I set toys on fire. I started smoking. I lost all my friends. I loved everyone on earth. I dropped out of school. I shocked myself again and again, electric kisses. I heard orchestras in empty rooms. I found comfort in hallucinations. I was going to save the world. I was incoherent, listen to me.

These details are important.

These memories were whirring through my mind the morning I decided to die.

[kaleb-is-definitely-sane]

Hii i needed some classic book recommendations even tho im currently reading crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky cant seem to finish it reader's block ig if thats a thing? So im just tryna find books which would get me back at reading. Greek/classic Literature/ dark academia/ classic thriller and mystery into these stuff right now so yeah!

Sorry for sending such a big ask lol.

Hey Anonie. No problem lol. Now, I haven't read all those I'm about to list, but I know people (and have read people) that have and like them greatly so: (in no particular order)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Othello by William Shakespeare

Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

The Bakkhai by Euripides (Anne Carson translation)

Medea by Euripides (I unfortunately don't have a translation to recommend)

The Oresteia by Any of the 3 Greek tragedians Honestly (see above)

The Iliad by Homer (Fagles translation)

The Odyssey by Homer (Fagles translation)

The Aeneid by Virgil (Fagles translation)

Omeros by Derek Walcott

Wise Children by Angela Carter

The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott. Fitzgerald

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

The Woodlander by Thomas Hardy

Adam Bede by George Eliot

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Romola by George Eliot

Tess of D'Uberville by Thomas Hardy

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Theban Trilogy by Sophocles

The Turn of the Shrew by Henry James

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

The Mystery of the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

King Lear by William Shakespeare

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

The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Ulysses by James Joyce

Beloved by Toni Morrison

@maryoliverdotcom @memory-the-unconscious do yall have any suggestions??

[panvani]

There's this huge mythos around Dark Themes that posits that Dark Themes in writing are treated with disdain/suspicion, or that authors that write about Dark Themes are subject to substantially more investigation or criticism within the industry at large compared to authors that don't write Dark Themes. And like. Obviously if your story contains upsetting content, you're more frequently going to hear about people refusing to engage with your story out of hand, but... this is almost always based on personal comfort/preference, rather than Moral, Artistic Opposition. I know plenty of people who won't watch a movie if a dog dies in it, but you don't see swarms of people boycotting John Wick.

The conventional wisdom that stories with Dark Themes will be less popular is pretty obviously untrue if you consider anything about pop culture in almost any period of history. If we speak in recent pop culture (as is generally meant)... Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire is incredibly well known for its depiction of rape/CSA/incest, as is Stephen King's It. Star Wars is subject to parody for its recurrent themes of incest. These are incredibly popular, socially acceptable, mainstream works, criticism of which (on the basis of their content) has done nothing to stop each from making completely insane amounts of money. Whenever I see people claim that a work is avant-garde for its Dark Themes, it's almost always a work that has been incredibly commercially successful with no large critical backlash-- take, for example, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, which occupies shelves upon shelves of display cases in Barnes and Noble despite its depiction of multiple explicit CSA and self harm scenes.

What works are subject to scrutiny ostensibly on the basis of their 'dark themes,' like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, tend to be far more tame by comparison-- The Bluest Eye contains one extremely short and exceptionally dry description of a man raping his daughter, and Lolita contains no explicit sexual scenes at all. Actually what causes these works to be subject to criticism is the fact that they depict child abuse in a way which causes reader discomfort, rather than excitement. Nabokov actually joked about how he was strongly criticized for the lack of child sex abuse scenes in his novel, and attempts to ban Morrison's novel are usually transparently racist.

And, I mean, sure, there is an extent population that will become strongly critical of a work after learning that it has themes of abuse, regardless of the actual execution of these themes... but somehow whenever I see authors talk about how they're basically Christ on the cross for including a child rape scene in their novel (or fanfiction), they do so from a place of artistic and cultural success, and are lauded for doing so. It's just... immensely tiring.

[satancopilotsmytardis]

what books would you consider essential reading, for any reason? Bulking up my tbr list

Oh here comes the cardinal sin: I'm not a reader. The last book I read for "fun" was a FNAF novel and entirely because unfortunately that franchise owns my soul, not because it's good or enjoyable.

My favorite books are the Six of Crows Douology.

Some books I think are important to read and that I think had an effect on how I personally write are:

Invisible Man by Ralph Elison

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Book Thief and I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

(I'm not saying I necessarily enjoyed all of these books or recommend them for every reader, but they were influential for me as a writer)