Bookshelf · Dark AcademiaPreview

Frances.

Conversations with Friends · 2017

Dublin, twentysomething, performing poetry and quietly miserable. Frances’s reading list runs from Marxism to Anne Carson.

"I had nothing to say, so I said it."

3 booksCurated · cited · cross-referenced

The shelf, decoded

Why this list.

Frances reads what Trinity students read in 2014: Marxism in paperback, Anne Carson in hardback, and tweets in between.

The reading list

3 books for Frances.

No. 01Character fit
Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
Frances’s formative book. Quoted in her own performance poetry.
CitationCharacter-fit
No. 02On screen
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx
Frances’s actual political reading, performed and partly meant.
CitationNovel
No. 03Character fit
Bluets
Maggie Nelson
The book Bobbi gives Frances after the diagnosis.
CitationCharacter-fit

Closing note

Read in airports.

Richard Papen

Cover of A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Hampden College, Greek tragedy, and a murder on the page. Richard’s shelves are the foundational dark academia syllabus.

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The GoldfinchSoon

Theo Decker

Cover of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cover of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Cover of The Recognitions by William Gaddis

Manhattan, Las Vegas, Amsterdam. Theo carries a stolen painting and a reading list of grief, art history, and Russian existentialism.

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If We Were VillainsSoon

Oliver Marks

Cover of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Cover of King Lear by William Shakespeare

Cover of The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare conservatory, seven actors, one dead body. Oliver’s reading list is the entire First Folio plus the modern criticism that haunts him for ten years.

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