One day, this will all be over. Yet the fact will remain that we were here once, beneath all that lace. The fact needs no proof. We were here. What great fortune. For what? we kept demanding. For what? For what? For what? For what? But when a tree sprouts from the ground, it doesn’t demand answers; when its blossoms grow tired and heavy, it lets them drop. After all our trouble, is that it, then? Did it all mean nothing but itself?

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao

The stories of our lives are ephemeral: When we die, they die, too. But what if someone (what if I) could gather up these stories and hold on to them for safekeeping? When humans finally drive ourselves to extinction, wouldn’t that be our best shot at proving to the universe that, once upon a time, we were here?

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao

Title: The Immortal King Rao | Author: Vauhini Vara | Publisher: W. W. Norton Company (2022)

INDIA / EGYPT - THE BHARAT :

Our Heritage : Our Pride, Our Identity :

The similarities between the Vedic Gods and Egyptian Gods are numerous and striking.

Vedic Gods in Egyptian Pyramids and Literature

GARUD :

Garud is younger brother of Aruna. Garuda associated with Garud Puran, book that deals with soul after death. Horus is associated with Egyptian book of the dead. Just like Horus, Garud often acts as a messenger between the gods and men and is called the ranger of the skies. Anzu steals the tablets of destiny. Anzu is the servant of chief sky god Enlil. Ninruta chases Anzu with his thunderbolts. Garud steals the elixir of immortality. Garud is the servant of chief Bhagwan Vishnu. Indra chases Garud with his thunderbolts.

DAKSH :

Khnum is referred to as father of the fathers and fathered many gods and goddesses. Daksh was one of the sons of Brahma and a main prajapati from whose line Dev's and Asur's come from. Many goddesses like Aditi, Diti, Danu, Sati etc came from Daksh. Daksh was known as the bright one. Both of them are depicted with the head of a goat like creature. Daksh is believed to have started sexual reproduction. Heqet, wife of Khnum is associated with childbirth. Prasuti Tantra, the book of obstetrics is named after Prasuti, the wife of Daksh.

MATSYADEV :

Matsya, incarnation of Bhagwan Vishnu is mentioned as Hatmehit, or Hatmehyt in Egyptian History. The name literally means Protector-chief of fish. Hatmehit is always related with Mehet-Weret, meaning great flood. When the world was consumed by the oceanic water, Bhagwan Vishnu appeared in the form of a fish and saved the species of animals, plants and humans. Hatmehit is depicted with a horn on His head and a snake tied to it. As we know, Matsya was a large golden fish with a horn to which a huge boat was tied by the king of serpents, Vasuki.

RATING NANDAMURI TARAKA RAMA RAO JR’S MANSPREADS ON A SCALE OF 1 - 10

Jai is back with yet more manspread excellence, because he is incapable of anything less! Literally all the essentials are here! The aggressive stare-down, the fist PLUNGING into his own thigh, bracing the weight of his CONTEMPT, the tantalizing glimpse at the crotch seam of his very, very stressed jeans, the KILOMETERS of distance between his knees, the gaudy accessories, the glaring presence of just the absolute biggest fuckoff cock energy!!! YES!!!!! Once again, Jai reigns supreme!

We need to talk about Jai’s numerous THRONES. Raavan is more than a king, he’s the immortal god emperor of Lanka, and he pathologically NEEDS to demonstrate that in the gayest, most theatrical, over the top, campy, ballsed-out way 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. He cannot be contained!!!!! This throne is a work of art unto itself! The filigree, the ornamentation, the rich velvet, the obscene BREADTH! To have a throne like this and to just fuckin straddle it like that is the very PICTURE of manspread excellence!

A couple final words of praise: the arm seams on his kurta are AT DEATH’S DOOR, my god I’ve never seen such stress on a garment!!! And the little thumb-out variation of the fist plant is so unexpected, but I’m tickled pink! I think it adds marvelous flavor and intrigue!

FINAL VERDICT: 10/10

hello isa!!! can i ask 42 and 43 for the meme?

Hello Kyo!! Absolutely!

42. favourite book(s)

In no particular order and hopefully switched up a bit from how I often answer this question:

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

This book made me CRAZY INSANE clawing the walls. Story of a lesbian marriage that's dissolving after the primary narrator's wife returns from an exploratory submarine mission during which her vessel sank to the bottom of the ocean and stayed there for three months. Told in snippets of the present from one wife and flashbacks of being trapped in the submarine from the other. Just so so so fucking good.

2. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Okay, like, obviously all of tumblr has heard about the Locked Tomb series, and I probably wouldn't recommend reading this without reading the first book first, but this book, the second installment, is imo far and away the best. Told in really compelling second-person narration (the reason for which is revealed near the end of the story) with lots of eerie dream logic and also features a sensitive depiction of schizophrenia that's a perfect blend of mundane daily grind after dealing with it for one's whole life and still genuinely frightening for the main character to experience when new symptoms develop. And it's a scary lesbian space opera about imperialism and nuclear war and bone magic. So there's that.

3. Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

This one got really mixed reviews, and I see why, but personally I really enjoyed it — I sat down in a bookstore to skim through it and didn't stand up again until I had read the entire thing, lmao. Bisexual Reform Jewish woman with a severe lifelong eating disorder has a brief and tumultuous affair with a fat Orthodox woman whom she may or may not have willed into existence, which results in her dealing (certainly imperfectly) with her own fucked-up body image through the lens of intense desire for another woman. There are weird Kabbalistic dreams and smatterings of mommy kink throughout.

4. The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

FREAKISHLY prophetic spec fic by a longtime tech journalist basically asking what would have happened if Apple and Instagram had been invented as a single huge tech conglomerate (called Coconut) by a Dalit immigrant to the United States, King Rao. Narrated by his daughter, Athena, to whom he has left his recorded consciousness after his death. Vara started writing this book in like 2009 and published it in 2022 and it's so insane the shit she predicted. The sections that take place in India are also really good; the author is Dalit and interviewed her family members in India who grew up on coconut farms similar to those featured in the book.

5. Fair Play by Tove Jansson

Really bittersweet, subtle, odd little telling though short story about a pair of middle-aged women artists who have been in love for a long time and live together on a small Scandinavian island in the 1980s. Partially autobiographical and based on the author's romance with Tuulikki Pietilä. I read this a lot when I was first embarking on my relationship with my fiancée back in 2018.

43. favourite song ever

Really hard one!!! I am going to tentatively lay this honor at the feet of SPECIFICALLY the 1985 version of Bobby Jean by Bruce Springsteen off Live/1975—85. Oh how I howl along to that shit.

My latest library stack. Will I manage to get through any of them? Who knows, but they all sound brilliant, so fingers crossed 😂

I’ve just started The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. I’m in the mood for literary SFF (what’s new?), so hoping this one hits the spot!

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, amazingly there were two novels chosen for the award for fiction.

Pulitzer Awards for Books, Drama and Music

Fiction

"Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

"Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Finalist:

"The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

Drama

"English," by Sanaz Toossi

Finalists:

"On Sugarland," by Aleshea Harris

"The Far Country," by Lloyd Suh

History

"Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books)

Finalists:

"Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)

"Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

Biography

"G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking)

Finalists:

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

"Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

Memoir or Autobiography

"Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

Finalists:

"Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

Poetry

"Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists:

"Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

"Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

General Nonfiction

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

Finalists:

"Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books)

"Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking)

"Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday)

Music

"Omar," by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Finalists:

"Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," by Tyshawn Sorey

"Perspective," by Jerrilynn Patton

erika! if you're still taking book asks: 1, 11, 21! 💌

book worms 📖🐛 ask game

1. Name the best book you’ve read so far this year.

I answered this already but I'll list another one, Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. YES it is as good as advertised. YES it does deserve its classic status. Specifically I read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, my edition of the book is the Bicentennial Vintage Classics edition which was released in 2021. It has footnotes that are really helpful for understanding the book's references and what is significant in Russian but untranslatable into English, such as when characters use the formal "you" (вы) vs informal "you" (ты). I'm not sure how faithful the translation itself is, as I don't know much Russian beyond like, a 5 year old's level, but it was a really good read and the footnotes help a lot!

11. Favorite historical fiction.

This is difficult because I don’t read a lot of historical fiction that doesn’t also have another element to it like sci-fi or fantasy, like “it’s set in the 1920s, but the protagonist has lightning powers” or something like that, or if part of the narrative is in the past, part is in the present, part is in the future. If I’m reading about the lives of people at a specific point in history, I like to read books that were written at or near that time, like reading Pride and Prejudice to learn more about 1800s England.

But I do like some! I think my favorite historical fiction book would be either The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco or The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. For a book set in the past with fantastical elements, I would say The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. For a book with a dual narrative of the past and future that includes fantastical elements in the latter, I really liked The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara.

21. The book(s) on your school reading list that you actually enjoyed.

The funny thing about me is that I enjoyed pretty much every book we read for school! It would be shorter for me to list the ones that I didn’t like (Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is the only one that I really hated), but some that stick out are All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I still have those on my bookshelf today.

2023 SFF New Releases that I am PSYCHED for:

The Blood Gift by NE Davenport (out April 18)

The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao (out June 13)

Dark Water Daughter by HM Long (out July 11)

Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong (out July 18)

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem (out July 18)

The Water Outlaws by SL Huang (out August 22)

The Phenix King by Aparna Verma (out August 29)

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree (out November 7)

The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah (out November 14)

There’s a word for the feeling of having lost a loved one. It’s a small word, grief. But for the disappearance of the one person by whom you have defined yourself, without whom you cannot be sure of your own existence, there is no word at all. If there were, it would have to be an endless one. You would go on speaking it for the rest of your life. You would die with the word on your lips.

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao

868. Vauhini Vara

Vauhini Vara is the author of the story collection This is Salvaged, available from W.W. Norton & Co.

Vara has been a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of the novel The Immortal King Rao, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

***

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hello!! could i ask your top 5 books and/or movies?

ABSOLUTELY and I'm happy to do both of these tbqh. EDIT: SHOULD NOT HAVE SAID THAT BC THIS GOT VERY LONG SORRY. I'm literally putting it under a cut

BOOKS

This one takes its ceremonial place at the top because of how completely batshit it made me for years: Les liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (and its 1988 film adaptation starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich). Like nothing compares 2 U babe. Eighteenth-century French aristocrats play sexual games with the lives of the people around them. They are so evil and so fucked and so completely incapable of ever achieving happiness because of how tied what they think happiness is is to the misery of others.

[[[VERY VERY LOUDLY]]] Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield!!!!!!!!!! Oooohhhh it haunts me so bad. Fucked-up came-back-wrong lesbian romance about two wives, told through alternating-perspective chapters, one of whom returns from an accidentally long-extended submarine mission at her job doing marine biology for a mysterious bureaucracy. Most importantly this is a tragic portrait of a marriage and its dissolution. First book to make me put my hand over my mouth irl in easily 10 years.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, an Indigenous horror that ends up being about Indigenous womanhood, even though its initial principal characters are men. Four Blackfoot friends go on an illegal hunt in territory reserved for elders and kill a pregnant deer, promising to atone for the killing by using every part of her body. Meat rots in a freezer somewhere. The Elk-Head Woman shows up. Features the most thrilling game of life-or-death basketball ever played.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Makes me literally go crazy. Everyone's heard of this one by now but it's a prismatic prose-poetic series of pictures turned over and over and over through different forms of criticism and media tropes of the author's abusive relationship with another woman. Everyone liked Her Body and Other Parties and that was great but this is somehow better.

Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, in which a woman called Tiny by her husband's family has an affair with an owl-woman under cover of dusk and gives birth to an owl-baby who will never be quite "right." Husband becomes hooked on chasing dangerous, abusive forms of "therapy" to make the child "normal." Very straight-up allegory for raising an autistic child as a parent who refuses to subject them to medical abuse in the pursuit of neurotypicality. Cheered and stomped my feet at the end.

(Honorable mentions here: The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara [very scary and timely], The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan [extremely relevant to my line of work], Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente [thought this was the most erotic book ever written in human history when I was 17]).

MOVIES (in no particular order)

House (1977): the jangled, nightmarish logic of this movie is so perfect, the visuals are perfect, it's just the right cocktail of zany and actually frightening. It also has so much to say about like, so much shit, and I refuse to be the guy who's like "following my post of yesterday about how this work of Japanese horror is about nuclear warfare, please see my new post about how THIS work of Japanese horror is about nuclear warfare" but like. It is. As dreamed up through the mind of the director's preteen daughter.

The Watermelon Woman (1996): incredibly richly layered work about a Black lesbian living in 90s Philadelphia (a fictionalized version of the director) who becomes obsessed with seeking out and making a movie about the history of a 1930s "mammy" actress she believes may have been a lesbian. It is 100% fictional but is so extraordinarily detailed and convincing and weaves such a believable life for the figure the protagonist is chasing. DOES contain a Camille Paglia jumpscare. (See also Cheryl Dunyé's earlier film Go Fish (1994), a lighthearted lesbian romance featuring an extremely sexy nailcutting-as-foreplay scene.)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019): so, so beautiful and pierced me straight through. I like old French shit and lesbians and I loved the images of the movie and the world it put me in. SUE MEEEEE

Velvet Goldmine (1998): I have done some downright unseemly shit immediately after watching this movie is what I'll say about it. Horny supernatural glam-rock romance "loosely" based on David Bowie & Iggy Pop as cultural figures featuring gay people as the bearers of a magical spirit of art passed down through generations. Again. UNSEEMLY. SHIT.

Heavenly Creatures (1994): [chanting] LESBIAN MATRICIDE MOVIE LESBIAN MATRICIDE MOVIE LESBIAN MATRICIDE MOVIE. Dreamy, hallucinogenic take on a true-crime flick about that fucked-up homoerotic folie à deux friendship you had when you were 15.

(MORE honorable mentions bc this was so hard: Persona (1966), Gone Girl (2014), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Bound (1996)).

It’s back to big jacket weather in Melbourne today. My fingers have been frozen while working this morning. When I’m not working, I’m making my way through these 3! I’ve somehow managed to be reading 3 sci-fi/fantasy books at once 🤷🏼‍♀️

I’m enjoying them all but I will say my heart and head are so far mostly with The Immortal King Rao. I’m just so interested to see where it is headed! ⁣

The 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Since its founding in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize has recognized excellence in journalism, arts, and literature. The Pulitzer Prize winners for 2023 have been announced, and they represent some of the best and brightest in their respective fields. Among the winners are journalists who exposed corruption and abuse of power, authors who wrote moving and thought-provoking works of fiction and non-fiction, and musicians who created groundbreaking new compositions. The Pulitzer Prize continues to symbolize the highest achievement in these fields, and the winners serve as inspirations to us all. You can see the winners in all categories, including 15 Journalism categories, on the Pulitzer website. You can also watch the ceremony in full on YouTube below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpV2WuDX4r4 Books Here are the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners in the Books categories. Fiction "Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) "Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books) Finalist: "The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company) History "Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books) Finalists: "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press) "Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) Biography "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking) Finalists: "His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking) "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House) Memoir or Autobiography "Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday) Finalists: "Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) "The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday) Poetry "Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) Finalists: "Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books) "Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s) General Nonfiction "His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking) Finalists: "Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books) "Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking) "Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday) Read the full article