#tales of sappho

[sapphoslavender]

day 27 of sappho!

happy new year!

a little recap of the past week:

- shampoodle!! got new hair instead of that weird default stuff lol

- upgraded to super t&t!

- the cafe is open!

- i was about to construct a new bridge, but then i changed my mind, so i lost 50,000 bells that i had already donated :P

- instead of, you know, celebrating the new year countdown normally, i did it in animal crossing. luckily the countdown my family was watching on tv was delayed so i was still able to do the 3 2 1 HAPPY NEW YEAR and all that jazz.

- speaking of changing my mind, i changed my mind about letting tammy move.... but now marcel's moving! so let me know if you want him! he's moving next week :)

[asoftepiloguemylove]

ON DREAMS

Clarice Lispector / pinterest / Augusto Cury / Li Qingzhao (tr. Jiaosheng Wang) Tune: The Pertridge Sky; Complete Poems / unknown / Blade Runner 2049 (2017) dir. Denis Villeneuve / Victor Hugo from a letter to Adèle Foucher written March 1822 / unknown / Charles Dickens The Fellow of No Delicacy; The Tale of Two Cities / Anaïs Nin The Diary of Anaïs Nin / Sappho XII / Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai dir. Jim Jarmusch

[noctilucentis]

the coming of spring (for us south hemisphere girlies)

[ravenbookslover]

New books !

[gewska]

1/2 artworks I did for Sappho Tales artbook with my girls Halya and Yara🌜✨

[makingqueerhistory]

300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World

Seán Hewitt (Author) Luke Edward Hall (Author)

A landmark illustrated anthology of queer Greek and Roman love stories that reclaim and celebrate homosexual love and sensuality, from artist Luke Edward Hall and award-winning poet Seán Hewitt.

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world has either been ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few narratives are widely known: the wild romance of Achilles and Patroclus; the yearning love of Sappho's lyrics; and the three genders introduced in

Plato's Symposium. Yet there is a rich literary tradition of queer Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond the prudish translations of these familiar handful of stories. In 300,000 Kisses, award-winning poet Seán Hewitt and renowned designer Luke Edward Hall collect these stories--including some of the most beautiful and moving in the classical canon--and bring them to vivid life. Alongside celebrated works by Homer, Sappho, Ovid and Catullus, they include a wide range of rarely anthologized sources: raunchy poems, thoughtful dialogues, philosophical treatises, and even a graffiti text salvaged from the ruins of Pompeii. Through Hewitt's contemporary translations and Hall's vibrant illustrations, we encounter relationships that are by turns heartfelt and nourishing, unrequited and lustful, toxic and crude, tender and fulfilling. A groundbreaking anthology that seeks to change the way we see the ancient world, 300,000 Kisses is a fascinating journey through love in all its forms.

(Affiliate link above)

[hard--headed--woman]

Hello and happy Pride Month everyone ! 🏳️‍🌈

As promised, I am going to talk about an important lesbian in history everyday. And this first post is about one of my favourite :

Renée Vivien !

I have seen some people talk about her here but she clearly isn’t as famous as she should be, and she deserves way more recognition!

Renée Vivien, whose birth name is Pauline Mary Tam, was a British writer poetess, who wrote her poetry (and most of her works) in french ; born in 1877, she died in 1909, at only 32 years old.

Renée was openly a lesbian, and she never tried to hide it despite the society she lived in being extremely homophobic and considering homosexuality as an illness. In her poetry, she mentions her love for women a lot, and wrote a lot of love poems for several of her lovers. This even earned her the nickname “Sappho 1900”. ("Sappho 1900, Sappho cent pour cent").

Of Sappho, she was by the way a huge fan : in 1903, she published the work "Sappho", in which the poet's Greek texts are followed by a French translation, as well as verses by Renée Vivien, which thus "completes" the remaining fragments of Sappho's writings. This collection greatly helped to anchor Sappho's work and her identity as a lesbian woman in our culture.

Her work consists of :

Twelve collections of poems, totalling more than 500 poems

Several translations of Greek poetesses (including Sappho)

Seven books of prose

Around ten novels (written under various pseudonyms)

A posthumously published collection of short Gothic tales (written in English this time)

A book about Anne Boleyn's life

It is also possible to read her diary and the letters she exchanged with her lovers, friends and other personalities of her time, including Natalie Clifford Barney, Colette, Kérimé Turkhan Pacha and others.

Pauline studied both in Paris and in London, then decided, once she came of age, to come and settle in Paris. She published her first collection,"Études et Préludes" in 1901, under the pseudonym R.Vivien. This pseudonym later became René Vivien (the male version of Renée) then Renée Vivien, the name under which she will be remembered. We can easily guess that she first chose these neutral then masculine pseudonyms to be able to write and be published despite the misogyny and homophobia of her time, especially given the themes exploited in her writings.

Sadness, death, ancient Greece, love, despair, solitude and love are the most recurrent themes in Renée's poems. There is actually a poetry prize in her name, the Prix Renée Vivien, which rewards poets whose themes and style are close to those of Renée Vivien.

Among Renée's best-known lovers is Natalie Clifford Barney, a famous writer and poet, with whom she had a relationship for several years before leaving her, tired of her infidelities. It is said that Natalie never accepted this breakup and tried until the end to get her back by all means, sending her love letters even years after.

Renée then had a relationship of more than six years with the rich Baroness Hélène de Zuylen, married and mother of two children, with whom she traveled extensively around the world and collaborated on the writing of several works (under the collective pseudonym Paule Riversdale). In a letter to her friend Jean Charles-Brun, Renée admitted that she considered herself married to Hélène.

While still living with the Baroness, she received a letter from a mysterious admirer, Kérimé Turkhan Pacha. What followed was an intense four-year epistolary relationship, interspersed with brief clandestine meetings. In 1908, however, Kérimé, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, put an end to their relationship when she had to follow her husband to St. Petersburg. This break-up probably contributed to Renée's tragic end.

The writer was in deep psychological distress, which only worsened from 1908 onwards. Alcoholic and suicidal, she began refusing to eat properly, and attempted suicide with laudanum. After this failed suicide attempt, she contracted pleurisy, which left her very weak, and then chronic gastritis due to her alcohol abuse. She gradually fell into anorexia, and, with her limbs paralyzed by multiple neuritis, she died on November 18, 1909, aged just 32. Her death was attributed to "pulmonary congestion", probably due to pneumonia complicated by alcohol and anorexia.

After her death, intellectuals, artists and newspapers, out of lesbophobia, tried to make her forgotten by the literary world, describing her as a woman of evil and damnation, perverse and cruel, going so far as to invent for her a life of crime, debauchery, orgies with married women, violence and cocaine consumption.

Today, Renée Vivien's name is no longer known to the general public, and is never mentioned alongside those of great ans famous poets such as Arthur Rimbaud or Charles Baudelaire, despite her gorgeous poetry, her immense talent and fascinating work.

She's personally my favourite, and not only because she was a lesbian. Her poetry is the most beautiful, interesting and deep poetry I have ever seen. She deserves to be as famous as Victor Hugo or Paul Eluard (and even more famous, in my opinion lol).

Here is one of her poems, with its english translation :

A link to some of her poems (in french but you can use a translator) ;

And two links with some of her poems translated into english : 1 and 2.

You should totally buy and read her books and poems, I have them and they're amazing!!! I'll post more translations of her poems in the future for those interested.

Anyway, thanks for reading and see you tomorrow for the second post!

[katerynka-art]

My mermaids for Ukrainian charity project 'Sappho Tales'

[soracities]

would you be willing to share books or poems with your favorite or even pretty writing / prose? thank you 😊

oh Absolutely

books!

A Moth to a Flame, Stig Dagerman

For Two Thousand Years, Mihail Sebastian

The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

The Sea, John Banville

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

Possession, A.S. Byatt

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

The Book of Delights, Ross Gay

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

i am lewy, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Seiobo There Below, Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

The Carpenters Pencil, Manuel Rivas

Books Burn Badly, Manuel Rivas (full disclosure: the language in this book is HARD)

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone,  Saša Stanišić

From A to X: A Story in Letters, John Berger

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

Paris, When It's Naked, Etel Adnan

A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Four Bare Legs in a Bed: Stories, Helen Simpson

South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind

The Things We Don't Do, Andrés Neuman

We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales, Julio Cortázar

Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke

All We Saw, Anne Michaels (poetry)

Collected Poems of Vasko Popa, Vasko Popa (poetry)

Barefoot Souls, Maram al-Masri (poetry)

Without an Alphabet, Without a Face, Saadi Youssef (poetry)

poems!

"In Spite of Everything, the Stars" by Edward Hirsch

"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise

"The Roses of Saadi" by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

"The Stare" by Sujata Bhatt

"Stolen Moments" by Kim Addonizio

"Moonlight Sonata" by Yannis Ritsos

"No Title Required" by Wislawa Szymborska

"I Sleep A Lot" by Czeslaw Milosz

"Prayer for the Mutilated World" by sam sax

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski

"I Cannot be Known" by Paul Eluard

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Filling Spice Jars as Your Wife" by Kai Coggin

"Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee

"This Room and Everything in It" by Li-Young Lee

"When We With Sappho" by Kenneth Rexroth

"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

"Not Even This" by Ocean Vuong

"Elegy of Fortinbras" by Zbigniew Herbert

"Wedding Poem" by Ross Gay

"Transformations of the Lover" by Adonis

"Cloves" by Saadi Youssef

"Punishment" by Seamus Heaney

"I've Dreamed of You So Much" by Robert Desnos

"Bleecker Street, Summer" by Derek Walcott

"Cave Dwellers" by A. Poulain Jr.

"De Humani Corporis Fabrica" by John Burnside

"The Great Fires" by Jack Gilbert

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert

[adhdedrn]

Assume that any and all language barriers can be overcome, be it through translators or other magical means.

Some reading to help you decide: Murasaki Shikibu - Japanese, author of The Tale of Genji, widely regarded as one of the first novels. Chrétien de Troyes - French, wrote in Lancelot, Percival, and other parts of Arthurian myth. Baroness Emma Orczy - British/Hungarian, creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, who was the very first superhero/masked vigilante. Wu Cheng'en - Chinese, author of Journey to the West, one of the Four Classic Chinese Novels. Sappho of Lesbos - Greek, regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets of Ancient Greece. Abu Nuwas - Abbasid, foremost representative of the developing Arabic poetic form, and the only person in this poll to appear in One Thousand and One Nights. Mary Shelley - English, best known for writing Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Oscar Wilde - Irish, poet and playwright, author of The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Importance of Being Earnest. Li Qingzhao - Chinese, one of the greatest poets of both the Song Dynasty and Chinese history. Alexandre Dumas - French Creole, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Edith Pargeter - English, author of historical fiction and most well-known for her medieval detective series The Cadfael Chronicles.

[ghostcradle]

this was crazy

okay shim cheong is as good as y’all said it was

[sapphoslavender]

day 21 of sappho!

oops! i keep forgetting to update y'all on my town. so considering it's been like, over a week, here's an update :)

- i got my dream address! 5B00-01E2-A6DF

- i got the second floor museum upgrade!

- i got a new villager, ricky! i hate him.

- toy day happened but i didn't give my villagers the right presents oops...

- i opened club LOL!

- shampoodle is under construction!

- tammy is moving out on the 30th! i don't really know how villager trading works in the acnl community, but feel free to message me if you want her and we can figure something out! i'm kinda conflicted on this tbh - she's not really my fave fave, but i like her. but i'm deciding to let her move so i can open more slots for new villagers :) someone please give her a loving home!!

that's all for now! once again, message me if you want tammy :)!!!!! she's cool. she'll probably be free, but if multiple people are interested, it'll be a trade!

[macrolit]

NYT's Notable Books of 2023

Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

ALL THE SINNERS BLEED by S.A. Cosby

In his earlier thrillers, Cosby worked the outlaw side of the crime genre. In his new one — about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children — he’s written a crackling good police procedural.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

In Murray’s boisterous tragicomic novel, a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons.

BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey

Lacey rewrites 20th-century U.S. history through the audacious fictional life story of X, a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene.

BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton

In this action-packed novel from a Booker Prize winner, a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper on land they each want for different purposes.

BLACKOUTS by Justin Torres

This lyrical, genre-defying novel — winner of the 2023 National Book Award — explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away.

BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN by Jessica Knoll

In her third and most assured novel, Knoll shifts readers’ attention away from a notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, and onto the lives — and deaths — of the women he killed. Perhaps for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead.

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This satire — in which prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom — makes readers complicit with the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside. The fight scenes are so well written they demonstrate how easy it might be to accept a world this sick.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

CROOK MANIFESTO by Colson Whitehead

Returning to the world of his novel “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead again uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point — here, Harlem in the 1970s.

THE DELUGE by Stephen Markley

Markley’s second novel confronts the scale and gravity of climate change, tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades. Immersive and ambitious, the book shows the range of its author’s gifts: polyphonic narration, silken sentences and elaborate world-building.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

In de Kerangal’s brief, lyrical novel, translated by Jessica Moore, a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help.

EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

The world-building in this tale of a woman documenting a new kind of faerie is exquisite, and the characters are just as textured and richly drawn. This is the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children, but adds a modern gloss.

ENTER GHOST by Isabella Hammad

In Hammad’s second novel, a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family. Instead, she’s talked into joining a staging of “Hamlet” in the West Bank, where she has a political awakening.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

FROM FROM by Monica Youn

In her fourth book of verse, a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism, Youn turns a knowing eye on society’s love-hate relationship with what it sees as the “other.”

A GUEST IN THE HOUSE by Emily Carroll

After a lonely young woman marries a mild-mannered widower and moves into his home, she begins to wonder how his first wife actually died. This graphic novel alternates between black-and-white and overwhelming colors as it explores the mundane and the horrific.

THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride

McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.

HELLO BEAUTIFUL by Ann Napolitano

In her radiant fourth novel, Napolitano puts a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family. Take “Little Women,” move it to modern-day Chicago, add more intrigue, lots of basketball and a different kind of boy next door and you’ve got the bones of this thoroughly original story.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

HOLLY by Stephen King

The scrappy private detective Holly Gibney (who appeared in “The Outsider” and several other novels) returns, this time taking on a missing-persons case that — in typical King fashion — unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE by Diana Evans

This polyphonic novel traces one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives.

THE ILIAD by Homer

Emily Wilson’s propulsive new translation of the “Iliad” is buoyant and expressive; she wants this version to be read aloud, and it would certainly be fun to perform.

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs

The sisters in Törzs's delightful debut have been raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things. Their story accelerates like a fugue, ably conducted to a tender conclusion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C Pam Zhang

Zhang’s lush, keenly intelligent novel follows a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps, in a not-so-distant future where industrial-agricultural experiments in America’s heartland have blanketed the globe in a crop-smothering smog.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

MONICA by Daniel Clowes

In Clowes’s luminous new work, the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins and track down her parents.

THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Based on a true story and translated by Lara Vergnaud, Sarr’s novel — about a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal — asks sharp questions about the state of African literature in the West.

THE NEW NATURALS by Gabriel Bump

In Bump’s engrossing new novel, a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THE NURSERY by Szilvia Molnar

“I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” So begins Molnar’s brilliant novel about a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

This dazzling, epic narrative, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a bewitching brew of mystery and myth, peopled by mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death.

PINEAPPLE STREET by Jenny Jackson

Jackson’s smart, dishy debut novel embeds readers in an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family — its real estate, its secrets, its just-like-you-and-me problems. Does money buy happiness? “Pineapple Street” asks a better question: Does it buy honesty?

THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due

Due’s latest — about a Black boy, Robert, who is wrongfully sentenced to a fictionalized version of Florida’s infamous and brutal Dozier School — is both an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel. “The novel’s extended, layered denouement is so heart-smashingly good, it made me late for work,” Randy Boyagoda wrote in his review. “I couldn’t stop reading.”

THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS by Vajra Chandrasekera

Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons, the protagonist of Chandrasekera’s stunning and lyrical novel flees his destiny as an assassin and winds up in a politically volatile metropolis.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS by Ed Park

Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s — Park’s long-awaited second novel is packed to the gills with creative elements that enliven his acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia.

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED by Idra Novey

This elegant novel resonates with implication beyond the taut contours of its central story line. In Novey’s deft hands, the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother hints at the manifold divisions within America itself.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Locked down on the family’s northern Michigan cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother, a former actress whose long-ago summer fling went on to become a movie star, reflect on love and regret in Patchett’s quiet and reassuring Chekhovian novel.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

VICTORY CITY by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s new novel recounts the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome, but the story Rushdie tells is of a state that forever fails to live up to its ideals.

WE COULD BE SO GOOD by Cat Sebastian

This queer midcentury romance — about reporters who meet at work, become friends, move in together and fall in love — lingers on small, everyday acts like bringing home flowers with the groceries, things that loom large because they’re how we connect with others.

WESTERN LANE by Chetna Maroo

In this polished and disciplined debut novel, an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash — which in Maroo’s graceful telling becomes a way into the girl’s grief.

WITNESS by Jamel Brinkley

Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers, Brinkley’s new collection meditates on what it means to see and be seen.

Y/N by Esther Yi

In this weird and wondrous novel, a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul.

YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang

Kuang’s first foray outside of the fantasy genre is a breezy and propulsive tale about a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own.

[agenderakali]

Reading thinkpieces about Sappho of Lesbos never fails to piss me off like 

“According to this cautionary tale made to dissuade women from thinking they could live like Sappho, written by men in an extremely misogynistic society, Sappho was a #bicon”

[burningclocks]

Lesbian date ideas:

Ghost hunting for eight hours

Start a community garden

Tell eachother your deepest fears and darkest thoughts

Swordfight at dawn

Exorcise a demon

Get a cat

Hold a knife to each other's throats

Get another cat

Open your third eye and achieve godhood

Build a cottage in the woods

Become a local folk tale

Solve the mystery of your mothers disappearance

Swim in a lake and then come out mysteriously different as if you've been fundamentally changed or entirely replaced

Accidentally kill a man

Bathe in his blood (totally by accident tho)

Intentionally kill a man

Burn down a church and kiss in the ashes

Start a cult

Make out in an abandoned building

Go through the five stages of grief

Invent more stages of grief

Steal a bus

Get yet another cat

Go to a bookstore

Destroy a corporation

Overthrow the government

Learn to time travel

Visit Sappho of Lesbos, worship at her feet

Exist in Rome for a day

Exist in the Victorian era for a day, disappear mysteriously from the ball

Start a conspiracy

Knit the fabric of your souls together

Stab Julius Caesar

Steal from the British Museum

Steal the Mona Lisa

Go back in time and kiss Mona Lisa

Learn the way of the sword

Be present at every major historical event

Exist in front of HP Lovecraft and watch as he loses his shit

Add a gay sex scene to every HP Lovecraft book

Do piracy

Rule over all pirates

Kiss in front of a shocked audience of Victorian people

Night at the Museum

Just the plot of Night at the Museum

Swim in the moonlight

Get another cat

Lead the lesbian revolution

Charge into battle

Slaughter your enemies alongside your wonderful beautiful amazing wife

Kiss passionately surrounded by corpses

Have highly symbolic and metaphorical gay sex

Love eachother in every universe as every couple to ever live

Breed flowers to be new beautiful and bizarre colors

Become happy

Achieve enlightenment

Ascend to a high plane of being

Put flowers in each other's hair

Get coffee

Become villains

End a bloodline

Kill eachother in a really homoerotic way

Experience catharsis

Sleep in each other's arms each night

Wake up next to eachother every morning rain or shine

Make breakfast and coffee for each other

Hold eachother closer when you have nightmares and are plagued by visions

Be old and be healed

Have the sun glow brighter and the flowers bloom in more colors

Love each other so much it changes the narrative

Love each other so much it changes the universe

Wait with each other. Wait for the next thing to come your way and then when that's over wait together again. Except it's not waiting. Imagine you cannot wait to wait with each other. Watching and waiting as the world comes at you

Cry

[mariacallous]

Partial list of the books that Helene Hanff ordered from Marks & Co. and mentioned in 84, Charing Cross Road (alphabetical order):

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, (1813)

Arkwright, Francis trans. Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon

Belloc, Hillaire. Essays.

Catullus – Loeb Classics

Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales translated by Hill, published by Longmans 1934)

Delafield, E. M., Diary of a Provincial Lady

Dobson, Austen ed. The Sir Roger De Coverley Papers

Donne, John Sermons

Elizabethan Poetry

Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows

Greek New Testament

Grolier Bible

Hazlitt, William. Selected Essays Of William Hazlitt 1778 To 1830, Nonesuch Press edition.

Horace – Loeb Classics

Hunt, Leigh. Essays.

Johnson, Samuel, On Shakespeare, 1908, Intro by Walter Raleigh

Jonson, Ben. Timber

Lamb, Charles. Essays of Elia, (1823).

Landor, Walter Savage. Vol II of The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (1876) – Imaginary Conversations

Latin Anglican New Testament

Latin Vulgate Bible / Latin Vulgate New Testament

Latin Vulgate Dictionary

Leonard, R. M. ed. The Book-Lover's Anthology, (1911)

Newman, John Henry. Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education. Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin – "The Idea of a University" (1852 and 1858)

Pepys, Samuel. Pepys Diary – 4 Volume Braybrook ed. (1926, revised ed.)

Plato's Four Socratic Dialogues, 1903

Quiller-Couch, Arthur, The Oxford Book Of English Verse

Quiller-Couch, Arthur, The Pilgrim's Way

Quiller-Couch, Arthur, Oxford Book of English Prose

Sappho – Loeb Classics

St. John, Christopher Ed. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw : A Correspondence / The Shaw – Terry Letters : A Romantic Correspondence

Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, (1759)

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque

de Tocqueville, Alexis Journey to America (1831–1832)

Wyatt, Thomas. Poems of Thomas Wyatt

Walton, Izaak and Charles Cotton. The Compleat Angler. (John Major's 2nd ed., 1824)

Walton, Izaak. The Lives of – John Donne – Sir Henry Wotton – Richard Hooker – George Herbert & Robert Sanderson

Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader, 1932.