books like the autobiography of red

Books like The Autobiography Of Red

I absolutely loved the Autobiography Of Red (and the sequel). I am looking for similar titles with similar themes of growing up, finding oneself, navigating feelings of love, loneliness, hope, etc. (they don’t have to be limited to retellings of myths). I prefer books with gay protagonists. Thanks for your recommendations!

by The-Director1119

Looking for good fantasy novellas on Kindle unlimited.

Literary fiction, is 48 laws of power worth reading, books set in a single location, non-fiction book recommendations on many subjects..

Different format altogether, but you might like the memoir *Elephants in my Backyard* by Rajiv Surendra, it has similar themes to what you listed!

You could look at Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. It’s a novel in verse following two late-teens young women (one of them with a girlfriend), with themes of family, identity, friendship and dealing with grief. It’s beautifully written.

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Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is Way Funnier Than You Remember

Emily temple revisits a masterpiece 25 years later.

Like many people, Autobiography of Red was my introduction to Anne Carson. When I read it for the first time, a decade ago, I was enchanted, moved, delighted. According to my reading log, I immediately followed it with Carson’s Eros, the Bittersweet and then If Not, Winter , both of which are very different projects, and both of which I admired for different reasons, but neither of which I loved like the story of Geryon.

I was not alone. Autobiography of Red , Carson’s fourth book, sold remarkably well for poetry (or whatever it actually is)—the number cited in a 2000 profile is 25,000 copies over two years—and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; two years after its publication, Carson was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Autobiography of Red was lauded up and down the literary world—my copy has blurbs from Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Susan Sontag, and Michael Cunningham—and soon became a kind of shibboleth for a certain genre of reader.

It was even, with Eros, the Bittersweet , referenced as part of a plot point in the pilot of The L Word in 2004. “ I think, um, those books practically changed my life ,” Jenny Schecter (a young writer, also possibly a sociopath, with a boyfriend, but no matter) tells Marina (who also reads Nietzsche and Amy Bloom). “What about you,” she asks, the camera zooming on her lips, “have you read them?” She has! Then they start making out in the bathroom.

Whenever it comes up amongst the literary girls and gays who love it, it seems to be discussed in these terms: life-changing (or life-reflecting ) adulation. And of course it is: this is a genre-bending, queer coming-of-age novel, half poetry, half prose, highbrow and postmodern and sly and sexy. It is a “novel in verse” but also a novel in fragments, a novel in irreverent scholarship, a novel in invented interview, a novel in list, a novel in appendices. It is a tender and extravagant love story, a careful, poetic unspooling of what happens after you run into someone at a bus stop and have “one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness.” Carson’s subjects are universal and timeless: identity, monstrosity, and “the human custom of wrong love.” It is also, of course, beautiful, full of surprising, earth-moving lines and bright red emotional landscapes.

But what no one seems to talk about—and what I definitely forgot until I reread the book this week, twenty-five years after its original publication (on March 31, 1998)—is how funny it is.

Everyone knows that Autobiography of Red is based on the story—the anecdote, really—of the 10 th labor of Hercules, in which the famous Greek demi-god slays the monster Geryon, brains his poor little dog, and steals his magical red cattle. More specifically, Autobiography of Red is based on some fragments of the story as written by the ancient Greek poet Steischoros, who miraculously chose to tell it from Geryon’s perspective. But let’s be real: despite a bunch of preamble, and the idea that a broken heart is similar to a broken head, the novel bears almost no relation to the source material. This is Anne Carson’s first joke.

No, actually, Anne Carson’s first joke is in the first line of the first prefatory section (more on these in a moment): “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” Ah yes, those famously difficult 26 centuries. Unlike all of the other easy centuries in which to be a poet.

In fact there are five prefatory sections, each in a different form: a prologue of sorts about Steischoros and Gertrude Stein and what adjectives are (“the latches of being”); a selection of Steischoros’ fragments themselves, which Carson says “read as if Steischoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat”; and then three appendices on this “unanswerable” side question of whether Steischoros talked shit about Helen, was blinded for it, and then apologized his way out of his blindness.

Appendix C, in particular, seems to me either a barrier to entry or a neon welcome sign: read it, and you’ll know whether you’re interested in this book or not. Appendix C: Clearing Up the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen! It consists of 21 either/or hypotheticals and clears up exactly nothing. It is irreverent and modern and very very funny.

The brilliance of these sections is, of course, that they teach you how to read the rest of the book. They demonstrate Carson’s knowledge and erudition, and the apparent importance and gravity of her source material, and then they also demonstrate that she will be playing a little game in this book—with herself, with the story of Geryon, and with you. As a poetry professor friend of mine put it: her “proemium” is akin to pulling the reader aside and saying “I’m about to tell you a very important story about farts.”

But wait, you protest, this isn’t a story about farts. It’s a moving love story! It’s a meditation on monstrosity! It’s sexy! It’s Poetry! And yes, of course it is. It is all of those things. But be honest: it’s also a teen romantic comedy. Boy falls for boy. Boy dismisses boy. Boy is devastated. Boy moves on, but not quite. Years later, boy runs into boy again. (“Geryon’s heart stopped. The man was Herakles. After all these years—he picks/ a day when my face is puffy!” LOL.) Things resume, but not quite. It’s good, and also bad. Geryon is an aspiring photographer, because of course he is. Herakles is dating someone else, because of course he is. They all go traveling together. We all learn something about ourselves. After all, everyone has dated a Herakles. (If you haven’t dated a Herakles, I regret to inform you that you have been a Herakles.)

It is a rom-com, but it is not boring, or paint-by-numbers. Carson is a surprising writer—in her larger conceptual movements but even more strikingly on the line level—and surprise is key to not only to literary transcendence but also to humor. I can’t help but love, and laugh at, lines like “They were two superior eels/ at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.” (What does it mean?)

Like so much great art, Autobiography of Red gives us what we want and also makes fun of us for wanting it and then gives us something we didn’t know we wanted at all and finally pats us on the head and tells us that actually there is no Helen.

Even the setting is funny, a juxtaposition of the fantastical (as a child Geryon lives “on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place”) and the everyday (is it Canada?):

Outside the dark pink air was already hot and alive with cries. Time to go to school , she said for the third time.

This world includes Agatha Christie and Charlie Parker and graffiti and stupid novelty t-shirts (TENDER LOIN) and hockey practice and a magazine called Balling from Behind (“a whole magazine devoted to this?” Geryon wonders, “issue after issue? year after year?”), and also it includes a red world with a red boy in love with a Greek demi-god, and volcanoes that spit out holy men. It includes a grandmother who name drops Virginia Woolf and Freud, and wings that tear “against each other on his shoulders/ like the little mindless red animals they were.” In the end, Geryon flies into one of those volcanoes. But he’s fine.

Ultimately—whether you remember it or not, whether we talk about it or not—it is this irreverence that underpins the book’s success. Yes, it is beautiful and swoon-worthy, poetic and formally inventive, queer and romantic, but without the grounding of the humor, without that essential connection to all our own stupid, embarrassing teenage love stories, it would merely be a bunch of exciting language shaken up in a box with song lyrics and scraps of meat. Instead, it might just change your life.

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Emily Temple

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May 3, 1998 Seeing Red Anne Carson retells the story of Hercules' 10th labor in verse. By RUTH PADEL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED A Novel in Verse. By Anne Carson. 149 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $23. lassical scholarship, rebuilding ancient meaning from papyrus fragments and linguistic likelihood, is suddenly the new image for obsessive love. ''The Invention of Love,'' Tom Stoppard's play about the scholar and poet A. E. Housman, is packing London's Royal National Theater and entrancing unscholarly audiences with Housman's scholarly lectures on the Roman poet Propertius as well as Housman's own poems of unrequited love. In lyric mode, the scholar and poet Anne Carson has created, from fragments of the Greek poet Stesichorus, a profound love story -- a reverie on the mystery of one person's power over another, seen through the double lens of scholarship and verse. Stesichorus was a Sicilian Greek from the early classical age. Little of his poetry survives, but it was famous for being both sweet (a nightingale, it was said, sang on his lips in the cradle) and, according to the ancient rhetorician Quintilian, ''extravagant.'' Giving lyric poetry an epic grandeur, he failed to observe conventional lyric boundaries. (This, says Quintilian, is ''the fault of a well-stored mind.'') He also wrote a poem, now lost, that showed Helen of Troy in a shameful light. Since Helen was a goddess, as well as a mythical character, she retaliated, he claimed, by blinding him. He wrote a replay -- a palinode that denied what he had written and said Helen had never gone to Troy -- and found he could see again. All this flickers through Carson's ''Autobiography of Red,'' a hybrid work of poetry and prose that includes witty critical reflections on Stesichorus and an imaginary interview with him. (Like other famous authors questioned about the ''concealment drama'' in their work, he produces inconsequential remarks that read like a cry for help.) But the core of her book is a reinterpretation of another lost Stesichorus poem, ''Tale of Geryon.'' In myth, Geryon was a winged red monster killed by Hercules. We know that Stesichorus' poem imagined Geryon's life before Hercules. Carson reimagines their encounter as a destructive love affair; in her replay of Stesichorus, Hercules does not kill Geryon, he breaks his heart. Her Geryon is a winged red monster but also a gifted American boy. (''Where does he get his ideas?'' asks a teacher in elementary school, when the boy produces the Greek myth of Geryon as his own autobiography.) Sexually abused by an older brother, inarticulately attached to his chain-smoking mom, he becomes a photogra- pher. His redness and wings stand for creativity, its power and its pain. (''Everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated him'' to ridicule.) Since Hercules is Action Man, unreflective testosterone personified, their relationship is inevitably fraught. (''Jesus,'' says Hercules, ''I hate it when you cry.'' He wants Geryon to enjoy sex, as he does himself, without the awful complexity of thinking.) So this poem is about knowing and loving a man who has a good time with you, but will never know you back. Geryon's redness is his inmost being, his selfhood, but Hercules dreams about him in yellow. ''Even in dreams he doesn't know me at all,'' Geryon thinks. Hercules exists ''on the other side of the world''; Geryon arcs his back alone in torment, ''upcast to . . . the human custom of wrong love.'' Through 47 compulsively readable long-lined poems of intense cinematic detail, Carson conjures Geryon's childhood, a brief affair and its cataclysmic effect on him: He burned in the presence of his mother. I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room. It had rained suddenly at suppertime, now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes filled the room. Love does not make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other from opposite shores of the light. After the affair he lives a ''numb life'' until, years later in Buenos Aires, he bumps into Hercules again. Hercules, with his new Peruvian boyfriend, Ancash, takes Geryon to an Andes village whose inhabitants believe winged red people are volcano survivors -- people who have been in flame and lived. Here the sexual triangle triggers violence, but ultimately a healingly creative insight. For unlike Stesichorus, Carson is interested in Geryon's survival through art. Geryon's photographic lens is a wonderfully rich image for what Carson herself is doing in her book. As Stesichorus got his sight back by reinterpreting myth, Carson's reinterpretation turns myth into the recording and surviving of pain through the viewfinder of poetry. Like ''Lava Man,'' a volcano survivor whose veins hold ''ocher-colored drops that sizzled when they hit the plate,'' Geryon comes through volcanic passion and out the other side. He is the eyewitness of catastrophe survived. The images, connections and ideas -- the whole well-stored mind pulsing behind this book -- are as extravagant and sweet as Stesichorus, and push the lyric, as he did, beyond conventional bounds. The poems are meditative as well as narrative: they reflect on photography as sexual learning (''Got your lens cap?'' asks mom, as teen-age Geryon flies out the door), on volcanoes and Emily Dickinson, on the Platonic image of wings as the creative aspect of love. Whether or not the beloved is worth the pain, wings lift the true lover's soul into immortality. The essential ''Autobiography of Red,'' the poem sequence, gains extra light from its playfully scholarly setting. (Greek scholars will enjoy the apercus.) But the poems also stand alone. Carson varies their tone wonderfully, in perfect control all the way from dry wit to high poeticism (''A winter sun had thrown its bleak wares on the sky''). She counterpoints domesticity with ecstasy, the profound with the bizarre. (An all-night tango singer is an off-duty psychoanalyst; an encounter with guerrillas is reflected in the eye of a roast guinea pig; passengers clutch toothbrushes on a night flight over the Andes while Hercules pleasures Geryon under the Aeroperu blanket.) And Carson writes in language any poet would kill for: sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted. Ruth Padel's critical books include ''Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness''; her most recent collection of poems is ''Rembrandt Would Have Loved You.'' Return to the Books Home Page

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED

by Anne Carson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 1998

            From the fragmentary remains of the sixth-century B.C. Greek poet Stesichoros, Carson (a McGill classics professor) fashions a contemporary tale of “identity memory eternity,” a postmodern extrapolation that blurs the distinction between the figural and literal.  If Stesichoros’s mostly lost narrative about a red-winged monster reads like an experiment by Gertrude Stein, Carson’s deliberately fractured epic reimagines the Greek poet’s Geryon as a confused and lonely young man, who nevertheless still sports wings, which seem to be an objective correlative of his differences, especially his homosexuality.  Surprisingly readable, this verse novel evolves into a fairly straight-forward story about Geryon’s travels in South America, where he runs into the great love of his life, Herakles, who, in Carson’s version, is not Geryon’s killer, but his emotional slayer, and also shares with Geryon a love of volcanoes.  As enigmatic as it may sound, this mock epic peroration on the color red seems to differ little from Kermit the Frog lamenting the difficulties of being green.  Fans of Guy Davenport’s dense fictions will appreciate Carson’s innovative style, which shouldn’t be confused with, say, Vikram Seth’s more formal and transparent verse novel.

Pub Date: April 14, 1998

ISBN: 0-375-40133-4

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998

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More by Anne Carson

BOOK REVIEW

by Anne Carson

adapted by Anne Carson and translated by Anne Carson

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah ( The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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by J.D. Salinger

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Autobiography of red : a novel in verse

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Autobiography of Red

Anne carson, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Identity and Creativity

As its title suggests, Autobiography of Red is a book that deals with the formation of identity. Geryon , the protagonist, begins constructing his autobiography even before he learns to write, fashioning a sculpture out of a cigarette glued to a tomato in an attempt at self-expression. As Geryon grows older, his preferred tool for creative self-expression becomes a camera, and his autobiography takes the form of a photographic essay. Geryon’s ongoing attempts at identity…

Communication and Mystery

Many of the tragedies of Geryon ’s life revolve around misunderstandings and failures to connect with others. When Geryon is a young child, his older brother sexually abuses him, threatening him if he says anything to their mother. Because of this forced inability to communicate to Geryon’s mother and his mother’s failure to listen for signs of abuse, Geryon’s brother is allowed to continue this abusive behavior. The trauma of this experience, in turn, instills…

“What is time made of?” is Geryon ’s favorite question. The yellowbeard , a philosopher Geryon meets on a trip to Buenos Aires, offers the unsatisfying answer that time is an “abstraction” that humans “impose upon motion.” Implicit in such a view is that humans construct the idea of time to measure and “impose” structure onto the trajectory of their lives, which otherwise is beyond their ability to control. In quantifying the passage of time…

Self and World

One of the central conflicts of Autobiography of Red is Geryon ’s quest for individual freedom. He is keenly aware of the fact that “there is no person without a world,” and this statement ultimately becomes his—and the book’s—thesis on how to navigate the larger world as a free individual. As a young child, Geryon fixates on the notion of “inside” versus “outside,” particularly after his older brother sexually assaults him. He learns that while…