Sherbert Illuminated

                    Blood. Tweed. Marble. In 2021, most teenagers can recognize the Dark Academia (DA) aesthetic. Its vintage, earth-toned fashions and morbid curiosities appear frequently on Tiktok and Tumblr. But unlike other aesthetic subcultures on those platforms, DA has deep literary roots.   Since art and history inspire many works of Dark Academia, digging up the genre’s messy origins can answer a few of its most common questions and criticisms: why is everyone so rich, for example? And what’s with the murder? The undisputed founder of the genre is Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History , which follows a working-class narrator at a fictional liberal arts college who gets swept up in the murderous machinations of an elite clique of classics students. Many modern Dark Academics admire the lifestyles of the novels characters: #TSH on tumblr turns up thousands of fanmixes and moodboards , as well as other DA content . The Secret History exposes the underbelly of society —

“It is the best friend’s job to help our heroine fall in love; it is not the best friend’s job to fall in love herself…I’m pretty sure I’m not the heroine. I don’t even think I’m in my own story” (3) Reading this book feels like closing the gate to an old garden and watching all the flowers die because you can’t get back in. It’s sweet, it’s sunny and you spent some good moments there but now that you’re older its just a bunch of dirt and dried-up plants. Once upon a time I would have loved Amy Spalding’s Young Adult (YA) romance The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles) but since I began my “campaign of reading” last summer I don’t think I would have picked it up willingly. I hadn’t read YA in almost a year. This book was chosen by vote for the book club of my local GSA, and while I didn’t like the last choice ( Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote) I thought I ought to give my old favorite genre a second change. I should be in the target demographic for this

“For a long time, God’s worshippers ruled the world. Did they do it according to His law? I do not know...I have learned that in the country of the white man, the revolt against poverty and misery is not distinguished from the revolt against God” (10) I feel empty, and not in a cathartic way. I had high hopes for Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, enough that I sought it out in its beautiful, hard-to-find Neversink edition. In general, I love novels that deal with colonialism, assimilation, religion and other complicated ideas. Well, Ambiguous Adventure is definitely a novel of ideas. The trouble is, it’s absolutely nothing else. Kane’s novel follows the story of Samba Diallo, born to a high-ranking family of the Diaollobé in 20th-century Senegal. He is brilliant and pious, but his education at the Koranic school of the Glowing Hearth is cut short when his parents send him to a French colonial school. They hope that he is the future, and that his Western knowledge will sav

  Please read this book? If you like sharply-drawn, illuminated characters, read this book. If you like thrilling and natural plots, read this book. If you like social commentary that even today rings out like a cymbal: read this book. If you like brilliant narrative voice, strong and haunting motifs, coming of age stories, musical prose— If you, like me, were assigned to read Ralph Ellison’s “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz” for AP Language & Composition, promptly discovered that Ellison was the best nonfiction prose writer in the whole English language but waited half a year to pick up anything else by him for fear of being disillusioned, only to realize that the only illusions about him were the ones you created by worrying: read this book. Perhaps that advice is a little narrow.  Let’s start again. “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibe

“Our Lady of the Nile was black: her face was black, her hands were black, her feet were black. Our Lady of the Nile was a black woman, an African woman, a Rwandan woman—and indeed, why not?” (11) This book is Dark Academia. OK, I know Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga didn’t write Our Lady of the Nile with Donna Tartt or ~the aesthetic~ in mind. She sought to expose the colonialism, sexism and ethnic tensions that led to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. But that doesn’t mean her work should be excluded from the lists of the best Dark Academia books, or overlooked by potential readers. It has all the elements of a DA classic: An über-privileged setting? The titular school is a is a prestigious Belgian Catholic lycée at the source of the Nile river, built to educate the Rwandan elite: “the young ladies of Our Lady of the Nile know just home much they are worth” (8). Dark themes, including murder? The novel is set in the relatively-peaceful 1970s, but beneath the alpine calm of the ly

“If and when a historian sets the record straight on the experiences of enslaved Black women, she (or he) will have performed an inestimable service. It is not for the sake of historical accuracy alone that such a study should be conducted, for lessons can be gleaned from the slave era which will shed light upon Black women’s and all women’s current battle for emancipation” (4) I don’t know why I expected to enjoy a book about systemic racism, classism and sexism—one that features sexual assault as a major topic—but I loved Angela Davis’ 1981 nonfiction classic Women, Race & Class . I didn’t marvel at its lyrical prose or engaging plots. My heart didn’t flutter as the articles reached their thematic climaxes. In fact, the primary emotion I felt while reading this book was dread. But dread is the perfect emotion for a book like Women, Race & Class , which explores the dark sides of the feminist movement. “In passing the 1893 resolution, the suffragists might as well have announc

  “The brownstone is midway in the block, next to a church where a blue tower-clock tolls the hours. It had been sleeked up since my day; a smart black door has replaced the old frosted glass, and gray elegant shutters frame the windows. No one I remember still lives there except Madame Sapphia Spanella, a husky coloratura who every afternoon went roller-skating in Central Park. I know she’s still there because I went up the steps and looked at the mailboxes. It was one of those mailboxes that had first made me aware of Holly Golightly” (4) This book makes me appreciate The Great Gatsby because it is so much worse. Both Fitzgerald’s classic novel and Truman Capote’s novela Breakfast at Tiffany’s are set in New York, and several similar characters appear in both — the judgemental queer narrator, the enchanting and misunderstood parvenu, the rich bigots, the “inferior” women, etc. Both are slim volumes about charming, awful people. The difference is in how those people are framed. Whil

  “The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition ‘I am a monster?’ It was easy enough to set it down on paper. But transmitting its significance was far more difficult” (46). I think I’ve found a new favorite author. César Aira’s novela An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter may only have 88 pages, but it manages to simultaneously map the human skull and the space between mountains. It’s a book about journeys, and it lives up to its themes on every page. Its narrative follows 19th-century German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas as he travels across Argentina with his friend Robert Krause, painting the landscape and testing the aesthetic theories of his mentor, environmental scientist Alexander von Humboldt. When an unexpected encounter in the pampas transforms his body and mind, he sees his art in a new light. To reveal more would spoil the story’s curious, unfolding magic: Rugendas was a real person, but as far as I know, this e