A reading list inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s HBO series “We Are Who We Are” set on a military base in Italy.
Luca Guadagnino received widespread critical acclaim and several accolades, including nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Nastro d'Argento for Best Director, and BAFTA Award for Best Direction, directing and producing Call Me by Your Name (2017) starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer (who narrates the audiobook linked below).
In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the emotional nuances that are the substance of passion. Find Me brings us back inside the magic circle of one of our greatest contemporary romances to ask if, in fact, true love ever dies.
“Given that Walt Whitman has played a key role so far in We Are Who We Are, it shouldn’t be surprising that this third episode opens with a lovely discussion about the value of poetry between our two teen protagonists. What spurs it may be Fraser’s copy of Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds (“In the body, where everything has a price, / I was a beggar,” he reads aloud), but it quickly becomes a chance for Fraser — and the show — to put forth a thesis we’ve already been seeing play out. In contrast to Caitlin’s fast fashion and junk-food choices, Fraser talks about how he’s “looking for stuff that means something.” He loves the intentionality of poetry, where every word is painstakingly chosen and demands that you afford it the importance it deserves.” Manuel Betancourt, Vulture
Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: "The poems in Mr. Vuong's new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds...possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words...There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong's sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things."
Jonathan and Fraser discuss Ocean Vuong’s first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a heartbreakingly beautiful letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Keep your tissues handy for this book or the audiobook read by the author linked below.
AUDIOBOOKS
