Desi Wlw Dark Academia Aesthetic

He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

this assignments so hard i can’t even romanticize doing it

Cultural Dark Academia

After my last post about the lack of representation in academia, I felt it neccessary to provide some examples of what I’m talking about. Obviously there are more countries in the world than I can list and provide books for, so for a quick list this is what I got. !! Keep researching !! If you have any more books by POC please reply them !! If a country isn’t listed, that doesn’t mean it’s not important, this is just what I could get together real quick. If I made any mistakes, please let me know, we’re all learning. We need to help each other end eurocentrism in academia, so value representation and educate yourselves 💓💓💓

Chinese:

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Dream of the Red Chamber

The Water Margin

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The Journey to the West

The Scholars

The Peony Pavilion

Border Town by Congwen Shen

Half of Man is Woman by Zhang Xianliang

To Live by Yu Hua

Ten Years of Madness by agent Jicai

The Field of Life and Death & Tales of Hulan River by Xiao Hong

Japanese:

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë

Pakistani:

Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

Ghulam Bagh by Mirza Athar Baig

Masterpieces of Urdu Nazm by K. C. Kanda

Irani/Persian:

Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji

Savushun by Simin Daneshvar

Anything by Rumi

The Book of Kings by Ferdowsi

The Rubiyat by Omar Khayyam

Shahnameh (translation by Dick Davis)

Afghan:

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Indian:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Aithihyamala, Garland of Legends by Kottarathil Sankunni

The Gameworld Trilogy by Samir Basu

Filipino:

Twice Blessed by Ninotchka Rosca

The Last Time I Saw Mother by Arlene J. Chai

Brazilian:

Night at the Tavern by Álvares de Azevedo

The Seven by André Vianco

Don Casmurro by Machado de Assis

Portuguese:

The Lusiads by Camões

Columbian:

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Delirio by Laura Restrepo

¡Que viva la música! by Andrés Caicedo

The Sound of Things Falling by Jim Gabriel Vásquez

Mexican:

Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolf Anaya

Adonis Garcia/El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma by Luis Zapata

El Complot Mongol by Rafael Bernal

Egyptian:

The Cairo Trilogy by Nahuib Mahfouz

The Book of the Dead

Nigerian:

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Malian:

The Epic of Sundiata

Senegalese:

Poetry of Senghor

Native American:

The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

Starlight by Richard Wagamese

Almanac of the Dead by L. Silko

Fools Crow by James Welch

Australian Aborigine:

Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe

First Footprints by Scott Cane

My Place by Sally Morgan

American//Modern:

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

Internment by Samir’s Ahmed

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurtson

Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch

Being the “eldest daughter” is nauseating and I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone

A father warns his daughter about men's intentions, their shallowness and crudeness; a father thereby warns his daughter about himself, his past self, too. I am a man, I know what it is to be a man; I was like them, and now I must warn you about them. I am warning you about myself; be careful.

Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

Masterlist

Poetry

Brother (tw: CSA)

Friday nights and clandestines

The anatomy of my heart is flawed

That awkward moment when you’re like “ahhh that was grooming” ????

Dark academia is 90% introverts who resort to murder when exposed to society.

We fold the sheets as we argue facing each other, we eat soup in identical bowls, shes sitting on the sofa while i sit on the floor looking anywhere but at each other. I listen to her talk softly to my niece a minute after she scolds me for not ironing her clothes properly. And yet the sadness i feel can only be healed by a mothers love. Its sicken and sadening.

Booklist for all the Dark Academics:

[Dark Academia book recs of all the different kinds I could think of. It's a long journey. Buckle up.]

The Classic Dark Academic :

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Anything by the Brontë sisters

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (this book birthed Dark Academia)

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Bram Stokers Dracula

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

Maurice by EM Forster

Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Good Man is Hard to Find

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Macbeth by Shakespeare

Othello by Shakespeare

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Poetry-lover Academic:

Poetry of Baudelaire

Odes of Keats (ALL OF THEM ARE A MUST READ)

Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (especially The Raven)

Shelley's Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Masque of Anarchy

Kubla Khan by Coleridge

T.S Elliott's Wasteland

all Emily Dickinson poetry but especially 'I felt a funeral in my brain', 'Because I could not stop for death' (read them a thousand times already)

Pablo Neruda's Nothing but Death

Langston Hughes

Tennyson's Lotos eater (underrated gem)

Sylvia Plath poems but special mentions to Lady Lazarus and the Bell jar

Paradise Lost by Milton (if you want to include something about the Devil in your list)

Poems by Sappho

The Contemporary Dark Academic:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (the origin of Dark Academia)

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody (could recommend it a hundred times)

The Maidens by Alex Michaelides

If We Were Villains by ML Rio

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

The Girls are all so nice here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wilder Girls by Rory Power

The Likeness by Tana French

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

One of us is lying by Karen Mcmanus

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Plot by Jean Hanff

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Conversion by Katherine Howe

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Quaint and Curious Volume

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

The Lying Games by Ruth Ware

Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates

The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas

Bad Habits by Charleigh Rose

Good Girls Lie by JT Ellison

Queer Dark Academic:

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (yes, yes, yes it's the gay shit)

Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) by Zoë Heller

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire, hell yeah!)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Maurice by EM Forster

Christabel by Coleridge

Poems by Sappho

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody

The Dark Romantic Academic:

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Likeness by Tana French

The Temple House by Rachel Donohue

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Mythological Dark Academic:

(pardon me for my cluelessness)

I have not really read much about mythology but if Norse mythology is the area of your interest, Neil Gaiman is the God of it. (aka not only Good Omens and American Gods, but also the book 'Norse Mythology')

The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

[Remember: Some of these books have dark academia as their major aspect but most of them have dark academia as their minor aspect, and many of them have been put into the list because I got a dark academia kind of vibe from them. Moreover these books have a lot more to offer than just Dark Academia, even if we ignore that aspect, these books are just great pieces of literature. This list is entirely created out of my own reading researches, friendly recommendations, and book recs from reddit, pinterest and the internet in general. If I have gone wrong somewhere or if you want me to add something new, feel free to drop an ask.]