Octavia Bright Recommends...
By review
Octavia Bright Recommends...
By review
Octavia Bright, author of the beautiful and moving new memoir This Ragged Grace, has put together a selection of titles that inspired her writing - to celebrate the event we had with her and Lauren Elkin here at Review on June 1st!
Gravity and Grace
Simone Weil
£19.99Along with Louise Bourgeois, I think of Simone Weil as a sort of godmother to this book - Gravity and Grace was recommended to me in early recovery and became an important text for thinking through and around new philosophies of living.
Angels in America
Tony Kushner
£14.99 £14.24A quote from this is the epigraph to chapter two, and it's a play, but still the most phenomenal thing to read. Kushner's writing is electric.
Blueberries: essays concerning understanding
Monash University) Savage RMIT University / PhD Candidate Ellena (Sessional tutor and lecturer
£10.99 £10.44This was one of the books that sat on my desk while I wrote. I love the way Ellena writes and thinks, her work encourages me to be bolder, braver, to think harder and clearer.
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
USA) hooks bell (Berea College
£17.99This book of essays is a phenomenal feminist text, full of hooks' clarity of thought and powerful arguments. They're all great, but while I was writing This Ragged Grace I re-read 'Love as the Practice of Freedom' in particular as a reminder of the transformative, liberating potential of love in politics: "we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centred longing for change".
Things I Don't Want to Know: Living Autobiography 1
Deborah Levy
£10.99 £10.44Reading these books taught me that there was another way to approach memoir, where sensuality in the present was just as important as memories of the past, and that pleasure and beauty in the writing are still welcome and important even when writing about difficult things.
Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
£15.00 £14.25A quote from this book is the epigraph for Chapter 4 - Carson has an unparalleled way of distilling a complex idea into a pithy sentence and I love everything I've ever read by her.
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
£10.99 £10.44I love the way Maggie folds philosophy and critical theory into her lived experience in this book, and makes it alive and relevant and embodied.
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
Melissa Febos
£12.99I read this when I was about halfway through my first draft and it was a great read and a generous and helpful guide
Diary of a Film
Niven Govinden
£14.99 £14.24I read this beautiful, transporting novel very early on in my first draft and it was hugely inspiring - the command Govinden has over his subject matter all the way through, the vivid but sparing way he conjures every location, every character...
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