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Bootleg version of David Foster Wallace's graduation speech "This is Water"

I may have to check these out

It's cool as hell so far

Cossacks is good! One of his less talked about novels

I've only read Three Month Fever of that trilogy, but what a banger

Lot of great stuff in Chapter 8. Not totally sold on all of her cultural analysis (Is The Matrix the movie we'd pick as an example of valorizing white male patriarchal violence?), but the stuff about how the most retrograde misogyny and violence is projected on to racialized others is spot on. I'm thinking in particular of the way that Israel's genocidal violence has been justified with reference to the evil Islamist hatred of women and queers. The part about the Hillside Strangler is also very interesting. I'm currently working on a research project about sexual assault with my students (a topic they chose by vote), and one of the questions that came up is what the link between mental illness and sexual assault is. There's a pretty common attitude that sexual assault is such abberrant behavior that someone who commits it is almost definitionally mentally ill, which as hooks points out erases the misogynistic/patriarchal character of the crime.

Off the top of my head, maybe check out Mark von Schlegell's books Venusia and Sun Dogz, really weird visceral and cerebral sci fi.

Another Gary Indiana enjoyer?? On my Hexbear??? Rent Boy is great. Also a big Gene Wolf fan

Some favorites of mine:

The City and the City - China Mieville

A murder mystery set across two cities that share the same geographical space but are completely separated by both law and custom. Unique, vivid and strangely internally coherent.

Gormengast - Mervyn Peake

One of my all time favorite series of any genre. Peake wanted to create a purely self-referential work of imagination and succeeded. An impossibly huge, impossibly ancient castle ruled by byzantine and inflexible laws that bind its inhabitants both great and small. It's really the first two books that have the world that I'm referencing here. The third sends its protagonist out into the larger world, and Peake was already suffering from the degenerative disease that would kill him and prevent him from finishing the series when he was trying to write it.

Hillary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series

A towering achievement that manages, through exacting historical research and clever guesswork, to bring to life the political, economic and social world of early modern England. She manages the rare feat of making the past feel both familiar and populated with people just like us, while also alien in their assumptions and worldview. Warning, however, the author has said some TERF shit in the past.

Dombey and Son - Charles Dickens

I could have chosen pretty much any of his books, but this one's my favorite of his. The great master of the Victorian Age, a man who managed to capture the essence of a time of great social and economic upheaval as he was living through it

New Hexbear Reads post for the week just dropped, come through!

https://hexbear.net/post/4169918?scrollToComments=false

Damn that is better. Maoist Standard English is an artform

I feel like pretty much anyone is physically capable of punching a hole in drywall

skill issue

I mentioned the statistics here are dubious elsewhere in the thread, but anecdotally it definitely seems like the case

Idk and the original survey was in some magazine, no idea how valid those exact figures are. Anecdotally, though a lot of straight women do have that outlook and I'm glad an open discussion is being had.

Also a lot of women jumping into the comments unprompted to say, "What?? Just because I don't want to have sex with a guy who has had disgusting gay sex and probably has AIDS, that makes me homophobic???"

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I notice you're avoiding the question