#wuthering heights for ts

[hellsbellschime]

I'm so fucking confused by the casting for Wuthering Heights. Elordi doesn't have the heft for the part, maybe Linton but never Heathcliff! Also, they say Shazar Latif is playing Linton! As Bronte very definitely described Heathcliff as a POC. i find it weird they've cast an Asian guy as the bland and safe English character and Whitey Mc White face as Heathcliff. Could the casting details be wrong? So much of Heathcliff's characterisation stems from how he's treated due to his looks!

No clue either, like no tea no shade but nothing I've seen from JE gives me the impression that he has the gravitas to act in a romantic drama against Margot Robbie, he could definitely surprise me but I feel like Emerald likes him as a person and he's an easy sell to any studio at the moment, so they wanted him to play the romantic lead.

[zombiechantilly]

Verano 2024

Un "Cumbres Borrascosas" tamaño miniatura y un pedacito de mi rincón de Taybonita 🤍✨

Pequeños vistazos a mi vida

[seriousbrat]

what would the marauders' (+ lily and snape's) tastes in literature and poetry be like? i like to think remus would be a kafka guy and i see lily as a big fan of sylvia plath and the romantic movement, but i'm curious about your take

Ahh I love this question soo much and I've been thinking about it a lot! Thank you for asking ❤️

James

sorry to say but this is a Kerouac bitch. this is a bitch who likes 'boy fiction' like On the Road and Catcher in the Rye. I also think James would like epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings, and science fiction like Dune.

Also, I'm just going to go with Muggle (aka real. lol) literature for this BUT I also want to say that I have invented a wizarding poet that Fleamont is really into for my fic, (this is just an excuse to write/include poetry lol) and James would like that too, having grown up with it. ALSO in my mind James would read poems about Quidditch lol

As for poetry, I think he'd like Beat poetry. But also TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas, similar to Remus, and Yeats, like Lily. An Irish Airman Forsees His Death is perhaps my favourite poem of all time and I think it would REALLY resonate with James. Especially since 'a lonely impulse of delight' would also drive him to 'this tumult in the clouds.' wahhh i love that poem

Sirius

I think Sirius would skew a little darker than James. Honestly as much as he'd hate this he might have a bit in common literature-wise with Snape lol, so I'm giving him Camus, The Stranger, and Sartre, Nausea.

as for poetry, Ginsberg's Howl would appeal to him. and William Burroughs. Like James, Beat poetry in general, though I feel he wouldn't be as into Kerouac as James.

A lot of this kind of stuff doesn't appeal to me as much (Kerouac is my fav Beat unfortunately) but I think generally Sirius would like fairly gritty realistic dark stuff. So the obligatory Bukowski is going here. Also perhaps Ted Hughes. Maybe stuff with a political/social commentary.

Peter

honestly I can't see Peter reading a lot lol but if he did, it'd be fairly easy and exciting things, maybe fantasy/scifi like James. I can see him liking The Hobbit. Also maybe crime novels or thrillers? Like kind of bad, easy to read ones haha.

Also comic books, i know nothing about that personally though. Super heroes?? lol idk

No poetry lmao, he wouldn't get it. Maybe he'd like humourous stuff. Limericks lol. An epicure dining at crewe / found a traitorous rat in his stew, etc

Remus

I agree about Kafka!

I just want to give someone this because it's one of my favourite novels ever, so I'm giving Remus Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier. (I think it's been translated as The Lost Estate in English but I prefer the original title.)

Hmm I think he might be a Hemingway?? Also Raymond Carver (who is one of my fav authors) anyway I think the minimalist, understated style of both would appeal to him.

I also think he'd like a good coming-of-age story when younger so, the aforementioned Meaulnes (honestly i rly just love that book) but also Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, like James, Catcher in the Rye.

And then when older it would be more minimalist stuff. I just think he'd be a Hemingway! Also maybe Steinbeck and Capote. I really dont know why I'm always giving Remus such American taste in things. In my mind he has great taste though haha.

For poetry I'm giving him Dylan Thomas (see? Welsh) and T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden.

Lily

absolutely Sylvia Plath! I had her reading The Bell Jar in my fic.

but also other poets, particularly female poets. Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Edna St Vincent Millay.

Yeats too, she'd absolutely love Yeats. Like I said my fav is An Irish Airman... but Lily would LOVE and be so enraptured by The Stolen Child (as am I)

as for fiction, she'd love The Mill on the Floss (as well as other things by George Eliot,) the Brontë sisters. God would she love Wuthering Heights (both the book and the Kate Bush song.) I think she'd like Little Women too and really identify with Jo (as do we all,) and also Virginia Woolf. I'll give her Oscar Wilde and Poe too.

Also I want someone to be a Wodehouse fan and that's going to be Lily.

as a kid I think her favourite books would have been The Secret Garden and Watership Down. And Alice in Wonderland. She probably grew up with Beatrix Potter and Edward Lear too. This is essentially just my own taste/what I grew up with btw lol

Snape

I think he'd like Kafka too. also, like Sirius, Camus's The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea lol. he'd be pretentious and dark, basically.

I also think he'd read the most nonfiction, specifically philosophy, specifically nihilism lol so the aforementioned Camus and Sartre, Kierkegaard, and NIETZSCHE. god.

He might like horror. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde. I'm not really a horror fan myself but I think Snape would be.

fun fact but hpwiki lists 'poetry' as one of Snape's skills and I believe that. Anyway, similarly he'd enjoy moody man poetry. But also be more romantic and more classical than Sirius.

I'm giving him Richard Lovelace, I think he'd relate to the romantic aspect of To Althea, From Prison (which is so beautiful) but also the tragedy haha.

As you might be able to tell this is heavily based on what I like and therefore what I could think of off the top of my head. I feel like if you combine Lily's taste with Remus's and then add a bit of the darker Sev side of things, that's just what I like lmao.

So I'm sure there's obvious stuff I'm missing for someone, pls feel free to suggest things!

Edit wait, since I mentioned Dylan Thomas I wanted to share this Welsh translation of his famous poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, sung by Welsh group Brigyn! It's a bit folksy haha but such a beautiful version:

[talesofpassingtime]

Essential Readings for a Serious Writer

(revised)

Literature is a dialogue between story-tellers that has gone on for about six thousand years. Unless an author knows the conversation thus far, it is nearly impossible for that poorly read author to contribute anything meaningful to the dialogue. Serious writing requires serious reading. All great authors have been great readers.

Pre-19th Century

Homer, The Iliad, The Odyssey

Sophocles, works

Aeschylus, works

Euripides, works

Virgil, The Aeneid

Boccaccio, The Decameron

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Cressida

1001 Nights

Dante, The Divine Comedy

Cervantes, Don Quixote

Shakespeare

King James Bible

Spencer, The Fairie Queen

Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Found, Samson Agonistes

19th Century

Goethe, Faust, Sorrows of Young Werther

British Poets - Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Gogol, Dead Souls

Turgenyev, Fathers and Sons

Dostoevsky, works

Tolstoy, works

Hardy, works

Dickens, works

Galdos, Fortunata & Jacinta

Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Works

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Jane Austin, works

Melville, works

Hawthorne, works

Poe, works

Stoker, Dracula

Hugo, works

Dumas, works

Zola, works

Balzac, works

Flaubert, works

Scott, works

20th Century

Woolf, works

Joyce, works

Lawrence, works

Hardy, works

Proust, La Recherche de la Temps Perdu

Musil, Man without Qualities, Young Torless

Mann, works

Boll, works

Nabokov, works

TS Eliot, works

Martin Amis, works

Gaddis, works

Pynchon, works

Durrell, works

Byatt, works

Burroughs, works

Faulkner, works

Hemingway, works

Fitzgerald, works

O'Neill, works

Anouilh, works

Grass, works

Garcia Marquez, works

Chekov, works

Ibsen, works

Shaw, works

Shepard, works

Fante, works

Maugham, works

Delillo, works

McElroy, Women and Men

Kundera, works

Anderson, Winesburg Ohio

Henry Miller, works

Barnes, works

Broch, works

Nadas, works

Genet, works

Gide, works

Tennessee Williams, works

Bellow, works

A few words of advice:

Reading chronologically makes later allusions to earlier works available. Know your Homer, your Aeschylus, your Virgil. Lots of things won’t make sense at all if you don’t.

Reading all the important works of literature is the work of a lifetime, so don’t fret about how few you’ve read. What matters most is what you read next, because nothing will influence your writing more than what you are currently reading. 

Reading is writing.

Memorize Shakespeare, the plays, the sonnets, the poems. You won’t regret a word. Nothing is more important to a writer’s education than Shakespeare.

I am only including works and authors I have read in this list. It will continue to evolve as I continue to read. I’m sure there are many thousands of important authors still unlisted. As well, sometimes we learn the best lessons from terrible writers. Reading is too important to only read well.

[windsweptinred]

Hello! Saw your post about feeling ill and hope you're feeling better today <3 I did have a question if you still wanted to chat fandom things - I'm a multishipper and I can see that you are too, so was wondering what draws you to a ship?

Thank you @rriavian 💖💖 I'm on the mend! What draws me to a ship? Oooh, that's an excellent question to get my teeth into. Thank you! And always fantastic to meet a fellow multishipper... Tis a good fandom life to live. 😅 Let's see. 🤔

Well for the Sandman Fandom particularly...

The Sandman has one of the most fleshed out, complex cast of characters I've ever seen. There's such a depth of shipping potential, and not having an OTP or particular character I'm averse to means I'll happily read and debate just about ANY ship I come across, even if it's not a personal favorite. Because there is so much intrigue in putting any of these characters together. Pondering on how they interact romantically and how that would impact the narrative. It's honestly one of my favorite things to do. I don't think I've read 'every' Sandman ship out there, but I've read a lot. And there's not one that's failed to hook my interest in a fic so far. 😅

As for my personal favourites, hmm.... Well I guess at the heart of it, shipping's subjective. I'm not sure I can honestly say exactly what makes me fixate on a pairing and say 'my darlings now and forever' 😅. But something in me must connect to them.

But if I had to try, I love characters who are out and proud little sh*ts, so I'm naturally drawn to characters like Desire, Johanna and the Corinthian. I tend not to gravitate towards soft ships often. (Though I still love me a bit of fluff.) Then I like to pair them with characters who have an equal air of complex disaster about them and let them reach some kind of harmonious chaos together. 😅 Not try and fix each other or expect them to be better. This is definitely how I see Constantdeath (Johanna x Death) and Corinthiel (Daniel x The Corinthian 2.0). Even with Desunity (Desire x Unity) I tend to look at the relationship as Unity loving Desire for the fickle little hell cat they are. Not in a, my love will change them for the better kind of way. And the sass on Unity! She definitely has a feral side and no one can convince me otherwise. 😆

So maybe my thing is, not we love each other flaws and all. But we love each other because of our flaws. That's something that binds us that no one else can understand. I've mentioned before one of my favorite books is Wuthering Heights. That may explain alot. 😅

Thank you so much for that rriavian. It was so fun to deep dive into that question. ❤️❤️❤️

[titansarmy]

Oh Twitter definitely is evil and crucified anyone who isn’t a s*langelo but I restrict my tweets to my 21 mutuals when I want to talk about Jasico! All the good stuffs in the private tweets since I’m a little too shy to share stuff and have people come at me unprompted.

I love love love a good Jason retrieval story like Nico can bring him back but it’s all dependent on Jason realizing and accepting that he’s worth bringing back he can want to keep living and be happy. Like, The Lost Hero opens with “Even before he got electrocuted, Jason was having a rotten day.”

I have one plotted about Nico petitioning his father and the other Olympians to go through a series of tasks to prove his seriousness in bringing Jason back and all of their friends help him in little ways throughout his ordeals so Jason gets to see that everyone misses him and are at least going to put up a fight. (It’s all kicked off by Nico realizing Jason’s kind of miserable in death and asking him if he’d come back given the chance.)

It’s such a good song… like we are truly accessing untapped Jasico potential at this point in the fandom.

(I also have Pat Benatar’s cover of Wuthering Heights in my Jasico playlist because “ooh, it gets dark, it gets lonely on the other side of you / I pine a lot, I find the lot falls through without you” and “too long I roam in the night / I’m coming back to his side to put it right” the entire song but… specifically thinking of ToA era.)

- 💀

AS YOU SHOULD !!! twitter is for the mutuals and the mutuals only.

no because jason for real never catches a break. :(. "Jason realizing and accepting that he’s worth bringing back" IJNFD the idea of him not thinking that he is, is so :(((( as if piper didn’t sob and pleaded for him to be brought back and if apollo himself didn’t pray for the gods to at least carry him to safety. jason </3 i’m taking him to therapy

OH OH THAT SOUNDS SO COOL. all of his friends banding together and showing him that they want him back? ohhhh i will cry. idk if jason is part of the quests or not but if he is and he can’t help in multiple points for a reason or another and at some he’s down about it and his friends are like “jason, we quite literally Dont Care. i/we can do it. you don’t have to do anything, all of this is for you”. actually this works even if he’s not part of the tasks because he’s literally just having to watch them doing shit for him.

OOOOH OH. that song. ok ok ok. i’ll offer my current jasico song which is wish that you were here by florence + the machine bc of that quote from ts*ts (actually multiple quotes from that book but this one in particular) “now, staring at that unnerving bust of diocletian, nico wished for nothing more than to feel jason grace’s protective arms around him. but jason wasn’t here.” !!! there’s so much from that song I’m actually. got i’m going to connect dots

[hyucktori]

2025 reading list

wuthering heights

frankenstien

the phantom of the opera

the picture of dorian gray

erha vol.1

the world as will and representation by arthur schopenhauer

phenemology of spirit

hamlet

inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth by robert a. johnson

the caretaker by harold pinter

four quartets by ts elliot

[missbrunettebarbie]

Top 5 book ships

This is hard because I can usually appreciate book ships intelectually without getting emotionally attached.

1. Lizzie Bennett/Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen) - I know, I know, it is cliche, but come on. They are Peak!Comedy and so adorable.

2. Cathy Linton/Hareton Earnshow (Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte)- I have a heart of stone so I rarely cry because of movies or books but..... this book tore me apart. I don't even like the original characters so much, but Cathy and Hareton truly ~touched me.

3. Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling) - I ship them despite popular opinion. And they deserve to be here because they were the first ship I ever shipped (from what I remember). From the first book, when Ginny was crushing on him I was like: "Pls, get togheter"

4. Jace Herondale/Clary Fairchild (Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare)- I know you do not like them, but I do. This was The Ship for me, the one that made me get into fandom and be active instead of being just a reader.

5. Queen Arsinoe/Jules Millone (Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blacke) - they are mostly here bc this is the series that I am most intrested in at the moment. And besides they truly surprised me. I don't usually ship this kind of dynamics when one female character is royality and the other serves them, but with Arsinoe and Jules it works. Maybe bc Jules is the truly powerful one, who knows.

ETA: Manon Blackbeak/Dorian Havilliard from Throne of Glass by Sarah J Mass would have been here if I could bring myself to read the second part of the series aka the one when they actually meet. As of right now, I love both characters to piecies and I read enough about their dynamic to make me scream OTP.

[rhosynviteri]

I didn't expect for this to get that many notes tbh.

The OP is @julia_ghoulia on twitter

I found a thread on twitter about Wuthering Heights and idc if it's legit but I accept it as my headcanon.

[thorniest-rose]

coming on anon to say that me and a friend absolutely LOVE your silverusso works!! theyre so eloquently written and we adore the character exploration!

oh my gosh thank you so much! I really love writing silverusso, it's such an interesting dynamic, that's my Little Red Riding Hood / Bluebeard / Wuthering Heights pairing right there. I would love to write more for them because despite spending most of my fandom time writing and posting about lawrusso, silverusso comes a close second, and I feel like exploring that dynamic (at least to me) is really important for how I envision Daniel and his trauma... like for me there's no CK Daniel without a backstory where he had a sexual relationship with TS when he was a teenager, because it determines so much of who he is (his distrust of other men; his hatred of Cobra Kai and what it stands for; his anxiety; his need to be in control etccc). So YES I love this pairing, and it's also such a great excuse to write darker fics!!! I was working on a werewolf Terry fic where he comes back and wants to claim Daniel again in CK S4, plus this long, angsty fic about Daniel's relationship with Terry during the events of KK3, so I will try to get back to these and post one as soon as I can. Thank you for your lovely message!! <3

[hellsbellschime]

Saw the Wuthering Heights /Jacob mention and my stomach turned. Oh I am not behind that casting at all I fear. I like Margot Robbie, I think she’s a superb actress , genuinely magnificent. But Cathy does at 19 and she’s 34… this genuinely could’ve been the chance to launch a new actors career. And Jacob as Heathcliff is just a slap on the face to his character, Heathcliff is a brown man, it’s 2024 ffs, why is there still a need to white wash this character? It completely washes down his anger/motivations. If she wanted to attach a big name to the project to add to draw audiences is, Dev Patel is right there.

The way I feel about this casting is legit how people probably felt when wicked casting was first announced, LoL.

Uhhh yeah Jacob is not my vibe in general, but he seems exceptionally miscast in this. Agreed that there are plenty of non-white actors who would make a much better Heathcliff.

[my-happy-little-bean]

The Bookkeeper (Masterlist)

pairings: logicality, prinxiety word count: 37.4k general warnings: implied major character death(s) (that occur outside of the present story, though they are technically “alive” in the story – it’s magical), mentions of minor character deaths (i.e. parents, grandparents), existential crises, mild swearing, mild NSFW content, brief mention of past homophobia *see beginning of each chapter for specific warnings

summary:

"fray and far fables" has always been considered by its patrons as ‘magical’; the books always seemed more vivid, their spines seemed to breathe — every story seemed like it could be real, through and through. logan fray wishes this was not the case.

buried in his research, logan finds himself caring less and less about his magical inheritance, and more interested in unraveling a single question: what is the meaning of art in a meaningless life?

however, this is not helped by the store’s familiar and magical bookkeeper, roman, who—with the help of the store’s dedicated customer, patton morgan—is determined to convince logan that there is beauty in art and, hence, life: by opening one book nook at a time.

--

this beautiful art was made by the wonderful @cyan-silver, who i gush about more in the a/n!

[read on ao3]

Chapter 1: Wuthering Heights

Chapter 2: Red Rising

Chapter 3: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

Chapter 4: The Starry Night 

Chapter 5: The Signature Of All Things

Chapter 6: 50 First Dates

Chapter 7: The Dispossessed

Chapter 8: Nihilism and the Death of Art (I)

Chapter 9: Nihilism and the Death of Art (II)

Chapter 10: One Last Time, Please

Chapter 11: The Midnight Forest 

Chapter 12: Epilogue

author’s note under the cut! :)

a/n - hello friends! and welcome to me, briefly resurfacing into the writing world with my annual big bang fic!

this was a very different type of fic to what i'm used to writing, but it is a story that means a lot to me! and i hope you enjoy it as much as i enjoyed writing it!

the most special-est of thanks to @cyan-silver! she made such a beautiful piece for this story that is rich with details and small easter eggs i hope you appreciate as much as i do after you read it! she went so beyond what i ever could've imagined, so pls don't forget to show her some love!

and shout out to @ts-storytime and everyone who is part of it! once again, it’s a fantastic way of sharing so many stories in this universe — i’m happy to contribute to one of them!

[glistenedasifell]

You could say Taylor read classics this quarantine 🤣🤣🤣

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë / seven by Taylor Swift / Little Women (2019) / seven by Taylor Swift / Entering the Kingdom by Mary Oliver / seven by Taylor Swift / Anne of Green Gables (1985) / A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

[cats-metaphors]

speak now moodboards - dear john

you paint me a blue sky and go back and turn it to rain and i lived in your chess game but you changed the rules every day 

[nostalgiawarrior]

Hello guys! I'm not even sure how many people will read this but anyways, my name is Priya.

I'm from India and incase you're on my blog you should know some teeny tiny things about me!

• I'm a huge ass Swiftie

• some of my other absolute favourite artists/bands are | Lana Del Rey | Lorde | Phoebe Bridgers | Cigarettes after sex | The Lumineers | Tigers in the Sky | Beach House| Conan Gray | Lauv | Sasha Sloan | Prateek Kuhad | dodie | Finneas | 

• I love reading a lot and {journaling (haha, I try)}

• My top books are 1. The book Thief

2. Norwegian Woods

3. The fault in our stars

4. The Kite Runner

5. The Great Gatsby

6. Wuthering Heights

Honorable Mentions : Turtles all the way down, Mahashweta, Thousand Splendid Suns, The Handmaid's Tale, Eleven Minutes, Kafka On the Shore.

My favourite Author is Haruki Murakami, I adore the way he describes things and situations in his books. Kafka on the shore is one of the most important books of our generation and I can't wait to read it again when I get a bit older so that I can fully grasp it's concept.

I love classic Literature too, like the place it transports me to. The first classic lit book which I loved was Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.

My favourite short Stories are "story of an hour" by Kate Chopin, "Kino" & "Men Without Women" by Haruki Murakami.

My comfort Genres are Bildungsroman/Coming of Age and Psychological Thrillers.

• my favourite movies are

1. 500 days of summer

2. Someone Great

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

4. Portrait of a lady on fire

5. Kal ho na ho | Jaane tu ya jaane na

Honorable mentions : Fight Club, Sleepless in Seattle, Notting Hill, Love and other drugs, Me before you, Dear Zindagi.

Basically, I'm a hopeless romantic

• My favourite actors are Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Shah Rukh Khan, Timothee Chalamet, Meg Ryan, Anne Hathaway, Emilia Clarke, Jodi Comer, Saoirse Ronan and Leonardo DiCaprio.

• TV shows I love are :

Fleabag

Killing Eve

F.R.I.E.N.D.S (watched it more than 20 times)

The Office (US)

Gilmore Girls

• My favourite TS albums are

1. Folklore/Evermore

2. Red

3. Reputation

4. Speak Now

• I've never seen Taylor live cause she's never come to India but seeing her live is the top point in my bucket list so I hope she comes here soon!!!

• it's my dream to visit New York City at least once in my life.

• I love watching YouTube and a few of my abs fav YouTubers are Ashely aka Bestdressed, notangel, Sejal Kumar, Jack Edwards, The Take, Modern Gurlz and Paper back dreams (kat)

• Yeah,I guess that's about it

[bananaofswifts]

Taylor Swift Leaves Her Comfort Zones Behind on the Head-Spinning, Heartbreaking ‘Folklore’

Her eighth album is a radical detour into the deepest collection of songs she’s ever come up with.

So here we are again. The world was in the middle of the cruelest summer ever, just staggering through late July, when Taylor Swift decided to make it all so much messier — her specialty. In a move that nobody saw coming, she announced a surprise album on July 23rd, less than a year after her career-capping smash Lover. (A year to the day after she dropped “The Archer.”) Like the rest of us, Swift had to cancel her summer, including her LoverFest shows, which would have been next week. Instead, she spent the quarantine season throwing herself into a new secret project: her eighth album, Folklore. But the real surprise is the music itself — the most head-spinning, heart-breaking, emotionally ambitious songs of her life.

It’s a total goth-folk album, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, largely in collaboration with the National’s Aaron Dessner. No pop songs at all. It’s as far beyond Lover as Lover was beyond Reputation. She’s always relished her dramatic creative zigzags, but this is easily her most audacious move, full of story-telling depth she’s never come close to before. Some of us have spent years dreaming Taylor would do a whole album like this, but nobody really dreamed it would turn out this great. Her greatest album — so far.

Lover self-consciously summed up the first 30 years of her life, bringing all her musical passions together. But on Folklore, she leaves her comfort zones behind. It sounds like she figured she wasn’t going to be touring these songs live anyway, so she gave up on doing anything for the radio, anything rah-rah or stadium-friendly. She just made some coffee, sat at the piano, and let her mind wander into some dark places. You can picture the candle on her piano flickering as the wax melts over her copy of Wuthering Heights and another song rolls out.

Her sonic chemistry with Dessner is right in every detail; she also teams up with her longtime wingman Jack Antonoff and duets with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon on “Exile.” The vibe is close to “Safe and Sound,” the rootsy gem she did with the Civil Wars for The Hunger Games soundtrack in 2013. As she explains in her Prologue, “In isolation my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”

Folklore really feels like the debut album of a whole new Swift — her narrative scope has opened up, with a wide-ranging cast of characters, for seventeen songs without a dud. Yet you can still hear that this is the same songwriter who dropped “Last Kiss” on the world ten July-ninths ago. Here’s a Swift progress report on her quarantine: “I’ve been having a hard time adjusting/I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting/I didn’t know if you’d care if I came back/I have a lot of regrets about that.” The power of her mind.

It’s amusing in retrospect how people actually worried that being happy in love might mean Swift would run out of things to write songs about. Not a chance. It turns out to be the other way around, as she lets these characters tell their own stories: A scandalous old widow, hated by her whole town. A scared seven-year-old girl with a traumatized best friend. A ghost watching her enemies at the funeral. Recovering addicts. A fumbling teenage boy. Three of the highlights — “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” — depict the same love triangle, from all three different perspectives. Other songs tell both sides of a story: “The 1” and “Peace,” or “Invisible String” and “The Lakes.”

Folklore hits overdrive halfway through, when it reaches a trilogy of heavy hitters. “August,” the album’s most plainly beautiful ballad, is a summer romance gone wrong: “I can see us tangled in bed sheets/August slipped away like a bottle of wine/Because you were never mine.” “This Is Me Trying” is the disturbingly witty tale of someone pouring her heart out, to keep herself from pouring more whiskey. “Illicit Affairs” is another tale of infidelity: “Take the words for what they are/A dwindling mercurial high/A drug that only worked the first few hundred times.” The tension explodes when she sings, “Don’t call me kid/Don’t call me baby/Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me.”

It’s going to take weeks if not decades to puzzle out all the intricately inter-woven narrative details of these songs. “Mirrorball” is about the same nervous dance-floor poseur of “New Romantics,” six years later, except tonight she feels like the disco ball that reflects everyone’s most desperate insecurities. “Mad Woman” expands on the familiar topic of witch hunts, but it also sharpens the feminist rage of “The Man.” “The Last Great American Dynasty” satirizes the upper-crust milieu of “Starlight” when she sings, “There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen/I had a marvelous time ruining everything.” (Taylor uses the word “marvelous” twice in her career, and both time it’s songs about the Kennedys? No detail is too tiny for her to plan eight years in advance.)

“Betty” is a first — she sings in the voice of the 17-year-old boy in a Taylor Swift song, reckoning with the fickle behavior detailed by the girls in “Cardigan” and “August.” It takes off from the harmonica solo in Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” — which feels appropriate for the only tale on the album where she goes back to high school. “The Lakes” is a bonus track for vinyl, CD and (what a flex) cassette, but it’s a must-hear: Taylor walks in the footsteps of William Wordsworth, the Romantic poet who essentially invented the kind of introspective writing she does, wandering the Windermere Peaks of the Lake District.

Remember when she was threatening to spend this year re-recording all her old albums? She does the opposite here — she refuses to repeat her most reliable tricks. So many of the world’s favorite Swiftian trademarks are missing. No country moves, no synth pop, no first dates, no “Taylor visits a city” song, not even a laugh. The references to fame are few and far between, although they’re tasty when they do show up, as in “Invisible String”: “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to L.A.” She can’t resist adding: “Cold was the steel of my axe to grind/For the boys who broke my heart/Now I send their babies presents.” Touché.

If Lover was the last album of her twenties, Folklore is the first of her thirties. Lover was styled as a well-rounded musical autobiography, with everything from Nashville twang to electro-disco. Folklore takes a completely different approach, yet feels even more intimate, simply because it’s the sound of an artist with absolutely nothing to prove. She’s never sounded this relaxed or confident, never sounded this blasé about winning anyone over. It makes perfect sense that the quarantine brought out her best, since she’s always written so poignantly about isolation and the temptation to dream too hard about other people’s far-away lives. (“Last Kiss” is usually a summer favorite, but this year, “hope it’s nice where you are” feels a little too close to the bone.) On Folklore, she dreams up a host of characters to keep her company, and stepping into their lives brings out her deepest wit, compassion, and empathy. And it sounds like for Taylor Swift, her best is yet to come.