For readers of fantasy, novels, and YA lit: we have an interview with the great Roshani Chokshi, author of this year’s highly anticipated novel “The Star-Touched Queen.” Check it out!
Continue reading “Project Spotlight: The Star-Touched Queen”
This post is part of a mini-series by I.C. on female characters, both heroes and villains. Find the rest of the series here and here.
Those Acro Collective readers who incline toward the bookish will agree with me that there’s nothing better than a complex heroine in whose struggles you can become invested. Victorian novels are particularly rich with such characters, coming as they do from an era in which women were beginning to call their society’s strict gender roles into question. Below are five heroines of Victorian fiction whom you’ve hopefully already met. (If not, do!). Based on which one you prefer, I’ve suggested other novels, either other Victorian novels or contemporary novels set in the Victorian era (or both), with similarly engaging female protagonists.
If you like Jane Eyre, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)… Continue reading “What to Read Next? Victorian Heroines Edition”
Maybe your *New Year’s Resolution* is to read more, or maybe you just like books. Either way, you’re our kind of person.
What are you guys reading lately?
by I.C.
In recent months I have seen a specific article return repeatedly to my Facebook newsfeed: Esquire’s now rather infamous list of “80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”—a list full of macho (and occasionally misogynistic) novels by authors ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Charles Bukowski. Flannery O’Connor is the only woman author featured in the list (with her collection of short stories A Good Man is Hard to Find), a fact that rightly spurred indignation in feminist quarters. Flannery O’Connor was thus still very much on my mind as I spent this past Thanksgiving in Savannah, Georgia, her birthplace, an elegant Southern city with charming squares and venerable oak trees dripping with moss and mystery. While there, I visited O’Connor’s childhood home. I am a great admirer of her short stories, and O’Connor is widely considered one of the greatest American writers, as well as perhaps America’s greatest Christian writer. Touring the house in which she spent the first thirteen years of her life, I discovered some of the influences that shaped O’Connor’s work. But I also found my mind returning to that Esquire list, and thinking about the larger question it implied: which books by women will men read, and why?
Editor’s Note: Hey friends! I’m pleased to bring you our new feature, Bookshelf. Each month we’ll hear from Acro Collective creators on what they’re reading. For November, our creators delve into a diverse mix of texts. As we all head off into holiday season, remember to set aside some time for yourself—perhaps with one of these good reads? Continue reading “Acro Collective Bookshelf : November”
Post may contain slight spoilers.
Since tittering with Acro coven-mate K.S. at the beefcake and bromance of Magic Mike XXL last month, I have been hungry for more stories about friendship. One of the best things for me about the Magic Mike sequel was the way it dwelt in male friendship and let the quiet moments between the men unfold. Those, more than any panting over hard dude bods, are the moments that I recognize as most genuine.
Friendship seems always to get short shrift in popular discussions about relationships. While desire, usually expressed as sex or ambition, romance or power, is compulsively and regularly narrated for us, friendship is always the consolation prize. It is the zone that represents thwarted desire. As a form of dependence that does not preserve the individualism undergirding our narratives of desire, friendship has the potential to be something radically affirming and constructive. And for all our chatter about the difficulties of romantic love—men are like this, women are like this, am I right, ladies???—it is friendship that feels truly dynamic, diverse, complex and difficult.
In preparation for this list I asked some of my friends to recommend their favorite stories about friendship, and as with most friendly advice, I summarily ignored it all (thanks, buds!). So below find a more or less idiosyncratic and personal list of friendship stories that I find particularly compelling.
Broad City
The relationship between Abbi and Ilana is the best-friendship I’ve always coveted. Both effortless and deep, whimsical yet vital, youthful but solid, their friendship is striking in its simplicity. Neither sex nor competition muddies their rapport and mutual devotion. And unlike other female friendships on this list, this is not the sweetness of girlhood dependence before adulthood and the world of men and sex intrudes. No rich dentist or kinky neighbor could hope to replace the spark that exists for these women in each other.
Ilana is the best-friend unicorn of every 20-something girl’s dreams. More adventurous, brazen and cocksure than the staid Abbi with a sporty suffer-no-fools attitude and a seemingly boundless well of affection, she is the exciting boundary-pushing fantasy girl that inspires so many submissions to Thought Catalogue. The manic pixie dream friend who doesn’t seek adulthood or personal development, but will joyfully hump a wall in triumph at learning that Abbi has finally, finally, pegged a guy.
Every time I hear Ilana’s “dooood!” I am reminded of all of my cusp-of-adulthood friendships and the self-contained intensity of young women who keep the best of themselves for each other.
We are, all of us, just Abbis searching for our Ilana.
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
There is a certain kind of friendship that is only possible in the presence of a shared enemy. I’m not talking about the kind of bonding facilitated by a bad boss or a mean teacher, but about a primal connection that can draw people hurt by the same person together. These friendships are built on the perverse satisfaction of dwelling in one’s misery, of discovering an ally who will poke your wound only to comfort you in your hurt. Finding someone who knows your pain intimately, and won’t ask you to metabolize it constructively.
This is the friendship that Roz, Charis and Tony share in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride. Each woman has fallen victim to Zenia, erstwhile best friend and recidivist husband-stealer, whose long-ago death is not as permanent as it should be. They are drawn together through their shared anger and pain at Zenia’s various betrayals, but they are equally bound by an unspoken grief at her loss. Although each woman rages and mourns at the loss of her man, filtered through that pain is the more fundamental betrayal of sisterhood and friendship perpetrated by Zenia herself. We might have expected it of men, they say, but how could a woman do such a thing to me?
Drawn together by the betrayal of another woman, Roz, Charis and Tony need each other simply to bear the pain of losing both their men and their sisterhood at once.
Withnail and I
The film follows the relationship between the titular Withnail, played masterfully by Richard E. Grant, and Marwood (the “I” played by Paul McGann), two unemployed actors living one drink to the next in a grimy London flat as they attempt to snatch a little relief from the oppressive misery of their lives on a misguided holiday in the country. It is about the kind of friendship made possible by substance abuse and the kind of substance abuse facilitated through codependence. Alcoholism enabled by a friendship that feels distressingly like addiction. Withnail’s calls for alcohol are a constant refrain, and one of the best scenes in the movie has Withnail guzzling lighter fluid after they’ve run out of booze while Marwood objects that “you should never mix your drinks!” Riding the line where devotion slides into addiction, it deftly captures the feeling of emotional hangover.
Here is codependence and self-destruction at its most horrific and compelling. Here is friendship with a profound loneliness at its center. Here are men who consume each other with needs that can never be satisfied.
I should mention this is a comedy.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I am devoted to bromance. Although I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about women and their relationships, my heart positively melts in the presence of genuine affection between men. Bromance isn’t exactly rare in film—the buddy movie is a time honored tradition, as is the cowboy flick—but the friendship between Butch and Sundance transcends, for me, the usual perimeters of male friendship prescribed by Hollywood. Their jauntiness is not a cover for homosexual panic. Their friendship is not an excuse to flee shrewish wives. They do not compete for money or jobs or women. No grudging respect, this. Theirs is a meeting of kindred hearts.
Butch and Sundance are so obviously in love with each other in that way that we fall for friendships that feels like destiny. The movie feels a little dissonant because it looks and feels like a gritty revisionist western with the sparkling banter of a romantic comedy. It lets Paul Newman and Robert Redford be beautiful and charming at each other in a way that feels more consistent with Frank Capra than John Ford. Theirs is the closest to genuine sexual tension to appear on this list. The banter is clever and flirty, and it really seems that bickering through the desert on horseback is the greatest pleasure these men could imagine. If Robert Redford were a woman they would have found their way into bed before the third act. As it is, they consummate their love through the proxy of an apparently non-competitive romance with the same woman—Butch handles the seduction and Sundance gets the sex. But rather than doing the obvious queer reading this film is begging for, I want to dwell in the friendship. This movie allows us to enjoy the erotic potential of friendship without insisting that its only pleasure must eventually be sex.
Harry Potter
At its center, the Harry Potter series is about the vital necessity of friendship to the struggle, any struggle. The ties of friendship in this world have the power to mobilize armies and topple totalitarian regimes. These books believe that courage is a function of community and that the causes we fight for must include the people we love. Friendship here is nothing if not a political association. It is the very basis of revolutionary potential and political action. Fighting for a better world cannot be divorced from dedication to community just as investment in friendship is intimately tied to enthusiasm for justice. It is, perhaps, a romantic fantasy to believe that a pure enough love can solve political problems, but I think it is just as true that the model of anti-individualist dependence offered by friendship is a good place to begin building a sustainable politics.
Friendship here, as in a lot of other YA fiction, is so much more critical than romance. The crucible of puberty and sexual awakening is a strong presence, but desire can never sustain the struggle the way friendship does. The most touching relationships in the series are not the romances, many of which whiff hard, but the fierce loyalty and trust comrades carry for each other. They fight for the world so that their friends may continue to live.
Sula by Toni Morrison
The friendship in Sula is, in many ways, quite the opposite of that in Broad City. While Abbi and Ilana can live uncomplicatedly for each other while high-fiving over their various conquests, Nel and Sula grow up violently and early to discover that the communion of women is perverse and destructive in a world organized by men under the sign of hetero love. Among many things, Sula explores the ravages that adulthood and sexuality have on the exuberance of female friendship.
Sula and Nel’s adolescent devotion disintegrates under the pressure of Nel’s choice to marry a man named Jude while Sula remains unattached and unapologetically unconventional. Eventually Nel loses Jude and Sula both, and they live most of their lives without each other. But Sula’s death provides one of the most heartbreaking moments of mourning for friendship I have ever found:
“All the same, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We were girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “O Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.”
To be girls together. That is a loss worth mourning.
Do you have a favorite story about friendship? Any recommendations for must-reads? Let us know in the comments!
Some consider the original Mad Max films to be the originators of the current post-apocalyptic aesthetic that’s now a familiar theme in film, literature and video games: the world becomes a dirty, gritty place and the real villains are the humans running amuck in the wake of large scale catastrophe and institutional collapse. If you’re like me, the adrenaline rush of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road left you with the desire for more dystopian action and it’s going to be a long wait for Mad Max: Wasteland. Since you’ve probably already seen Divergent and The Hunger Games, let me humbly suggest another way to get your apocalypse fix: a few great summer reads that share in the Mad Max spirit by being gritty, raw, or beautifully self-conscious of their own genre (and all the campiness, hokeyness and playfulness that comes with along with it). What a lovely day!
Some consider the original Mad Max films to be the originators of the current post-apocalyptic aesthetic that’s now a familiar theme in film, literature and video games: the world becomes a dirty, gritty place and the real villains are the humans running amuck in the wake of large scale catastrophe and institutional collapse. If you’re like me, the adrenaline rush of seeing Mad Max: Fury Road left you with the desire for more dystopian action and it’s going to be a long wait for Mad Max: Wasteland. Since you’ve probably already seen Divergent and The Hunger Games, let me humbly suggest another way to get your apocalypse fix: a few great summer reads that share in the Mad Max spirit by being gritty, raw, or beautifully self-conscious of their own genre (and all the campiness, hokeyness and playfulness that comes with along with it). What a lovely day!
1. If you loved the gritty, violent world of Mad Max: Fury Road:
City of Bohane
by Kevin Barry (Graywolf)
Post-apocalyptic wasteland fraught with feuding factions of dandies? A technologically retrogressive world full of violence, intrigue, and romance? A shit-ton of awesome futuristic sartorial choices? Check, check, and check. City of Bohane takes us through the lives of people in 2053 Ireland as they contend with their pasts while trying to carve out a future for themselves in the the barren city none of them can seem to escape.
Like Mad Max, the environment of this novel is bleak. Characters consistently refer to the Bohane river and the way it “taints” the city, suggesting that the book has major eco-critical potential. The novel is set in the fictional Irish town Bohane and follows the feud between the Hartnett Fancy and their rivals as they try to maintain control of the city. Logan Hartnett, leader of the Fancy, relies (at least superficially) on his mother Girly to authorize the Fancy’s wargames, while actually relying on the murderous talents of three young possible successors, the galoot Fucker Burke, a lovestruck Wolfie Stanners and the fierce Jenni Ching. If you are into gritty, highly stylized, dystopian novels with a unique, rich, storyworld, then this is your new read.
Though he deftly uses description, the real meat of this novel is its unique dialogue, which Barry has said he based on “working class speech in the cities I grew up in, Limerick and Cork”, noting that “Those kinds of voices have never really shown up before in Irish literature.” By combining Irish slang, new insults, slurs, and curses with the rhythm of the contemporary Irish accent, Barry has invented a new dialect that is at once completely understandable but also believably alien. Playing with the structures and functions of language seems to be one of Barry’s goals and he has commented that “[The novel is] written in Technicolor…It’s intended to be a big, visceral entertainment as well as a serious language experiment.”
This is the debut novel by author Kevin Barry, who has also published two volumes of short stories and has been featured in the New Yorker and won various awards for his short fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for City of Bohane.
2. If you were interested in the way that the “half-life war boys” were used as disposable bodies to serve the greater will of “society,” (read: Immortan Joe)
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro (Alfred A. Knopf)
Time Magazine called this 2005 novel by Ishiguro (who already has a Booker Prize under his belt for The Remains of the Day (1989)) “the best novel of the decade” and it was a finalist for the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award (among just receiving general praise!).
*This section includes spoilers.
The novel tells the story of three friends growing up in a near-future dystopian England where humans are cloned so that these clones–who are not regarded as fully human–can donate their organs to increase the healthy life of the “real” humans. The novel explores the experiences of Kathy (our narrator and protagonist), Ruth, and Tommy as they pass from boarding school, to young adulthood, to “completion”. The novel transports us to their early days as they attend a boarding school that focuses on keeping them healthy and teaches them to produce art–which in this society can be used to denote the presence of a soul. Art, especially when created by those clones who will donate their organs until “completion”, perhaps not only indicates humanity, but also can represent a piece of the clone that lives on after they have “completed” (much like how George Miller has explained that “the “half-life war boys” who are doomed to die young, and they worship cars because “the machines endure when they know they themselves will not.”)
Critics have apparently debated what genre to put this book in, but I’m willing to side with horror writer Ramsey Campbell who said in an interview that this books is horrific precisely because the characters don’t see the horror of their situation. I think this sentiment also applies to Fury Road—part of the reason that Immortan Joe is so terrifying is because the half-lives don’t see their situation as negative, even though they, like the clones in Never Let Me Go, have no real agency over their futures. As the clones are told, “Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided.”
3. If you were fascinated by the disgusting, yet powerful system of authority set up by Immortan Joe
Zone One
Colson Whitehead (Anchor Books)
There’s no way I could make a dystopian book list and not include a novel about zombies, since the undead often operate as a catalyst of the apocalypse. This setting asks us to observe the way that authority reasserts itself in times of disorder, be it through webs of interpersonal microaggressions and community organization or authoritarian or military-style takeovers. Therefore in a book list that is Mad Max-inspired, I would recommend Zone One, where the desolate wasteland is not a parched, stormy desert, but the empty and barren shell of New York City.
Zone One imagines the emergence of a post-apocalyptic dystopia in the portrayal of the American Phoenix government (located in Buffalo) which tries to use the symbolic capital of New York City to promote its own authoritarian ends. The novels gives us a personal account of trauma, narrated by a black man who remembers his life pre-apocalypse and continues to make cognitive adjustments to the new world as he realizes that his mediocrity in the old world makes him the hero of the new.
The tie-in to Mad Max is in the way that the powers-that-be hoard resources and modify/sacrifice bodies as a way to further their own authority. In order to earn their keep, survivors like our protagonist (Mark) are required to do some sort of work—for example, Mark volunteers to be on a sweeper unit to clear NYC of its last remaining zombies. “We make tomorrow,” says the American Phoenix in a call back to the puritanical work “ethic” that is responsible for humans being seen only through the lens of their labor efforts. The authorities in Buffalo are always sending along new rules and regulations to the sweeper teams: looting for example, is prohibited. Buffalo even tries to regulate the responses that humans have to the trauma of apocalypse, categorizing all of their sensible psychological reactions to trauma as part of the “Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder,” a disease that can and should be fought. Suicide is a forbidden thought—new empires need to find some backs to build upon.
The narrative oscillates between Mark’s past and present, spiraling around his telling, eventually giving us a full picture of him: his narrative constructs his being. While there’s a good deal of recounted action and moments of high drama that will pull on your heartstrings, what’s really significant about Zone One is the sophistication with which it handles its subject matter. Ultimately, its about the way that bodies (living and dead), institutions and the city interact as separate sites of power during the post-apocalyptic reconstruction, with a particular sympathy for the individual experience. Furthermore, the language is just gorgeous. Whitehead chooses to have Mark narrate in 3rd person–a jarring experience at first–but one you quickly get accustomed to since Mark is an entertaining, thoughtful, and powerful narrator.
4. If you were really into the way that Mad Max: Fury Road gleefully embraced the action genre while simultaneously doing critical work
Watchmen
Alan Moore and David Gibbons (DC Comics)
Watchmen is Alan Moore’s imagining of an alternative history where masked vigilantes work for the government. At once a powerful meditation on justice and power and a biting critique of the superhero, Watchmen is both action-packed and philosophically rich as it forces readers to confront questions about the duty of the citizen, the workings of power, and the value of human life. The narrative is told in a kind of zig zag, traversing both time and space as the now aging superheroes confront the actions of their younger selves.
This passage encapsulates the spirit of the novel–really the spirit of the aesthetic that this book list is built upon: “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.”
The character that utters these words, Rorshach, is complicated. In some ways we could argue he is the protagonist (if we can agree that Watchmen has a singular protagonist) because we have unfettered access to his mind through his detailed journal; however, this journal reveals the severity of his bigotry, but also his hopeless resignation in a world made dark by the threat of war. Rorshach’s staunch, legalistic moral stance seems to have been conditioned by his exposure to violence, violence that was then replicated in his behavior, making him too a victim of his dark world.
Admittedly, Watchmen is not without its problems. The novels shows us scantily clad female superheroines and uses sexual violence and abuses as a trope meant to signify that the world is corrupt; but both of these elements could be explained by the work’s inherent parody of the superhero genre. However, the fact that the female characters are not actualized outside of their relationships with men is less easy to write off. Despite these issues, Watchmen is still worth the read, mostly because of the grand scope of its critique. It explicitly asks us to consider whether the ends of peace justify even the most horrific means–a question that I still believe is relevant, nigh essential, for us to fully consider as we rise against institutions that disenfranchise its citizens.
Alan Moore has also written V for Vendetta (another great read if you’re into graphic novels), From Hell (Jack the Ripper in Victorian London) and The Killing Joke (which apparently Heath Ledger used as source material for his widely acclaimed portrayal of the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight).
5. If you were really into the feminist readings of Mad Max or the society of the Many Mothers
Egalia’s Daughters
Gerd Brantenberg (Seal Press)
I first read this dystopian critique/novel in a women and gender studies class I took while in college. If I am to be honest, I find it comically heavy-handed in its satire: The world is populated by wim and menwim, the latter of whom are relegated mostly to the domestic sphere while the former tend to the affairs of state. A masculinist party forms and threatens the extant power structures of Egalia—but this is all a backdrop for the coming of age story of young Petronius, the son of one of the powerful wim, Director Bram. The book hits you over the head with its critique, and it’s more than a little silly, but as one reviewer put it, “If it takes this reversal of roles for men to finally understand how women feel, to walk a mile in our bruising, too-tight, ill-fitting, high-heeled stilletto [sic] shoes, then I implore every man to read Egalia’s Daughters twice. It’s a real eye-opener, and maybe then the sexes can finally reach an understanding and possibly even reach equality.” Though I agree that the novel certainly highlights inequities in society, its real work is in showing that the real problem isn’t gender: it’s the way the power uses gender to establish hierarchies.
When Mad Max returns to Furiosa and her badass companions as they begin their trek across the desert, he comes with a plan: escaping isn’t the best way towards lasting satisfaction, peace, or redemption. Those purposes are best achieved through elimination of institutionalized inequity, ie. taking down the Citadel. The catch of course becomes—aren’t all forms of power in some way abusive? For now, until a sequel tells us differently, we can live in the vague hope that the populist impulses Max and Furiosa bring back to Immortan Joe’s people will last. But I suspect we’ll get to see more intricate workings of power in the post-apocalyptic landscape in future Mad Max films.
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