JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The trouble with the good times is that while they’re happening, we do not know that they are the good times. They may even seem terrible. To acknowledge that they are the good times is to curse the rest of our lives: they will not be as fun, it’s all downhill from here. Time is the queen bitch who doles out wisdom only in hindsight.

The more we think about it, the more idyllic the 90s seem. There was no social media and the Internet was new. Life was lived face to face, you could touch things, and friends were people you had shared histories with. We experienced boredom, which now seems to be a luxury. It was the last time we thought we understood the world.
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My annual list.

The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz
Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
HHhH, Laurent Binet
The Decameron, Boccacio
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang
The Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang
The Stories of John Cheever
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
Cheri and The Last of Cheri, Colette
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Transit, Anna Seghers
Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett
Compass, Mathias Enard
The End of Days, Jenny Erpenbeck
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
Paris Stories, Mavis Gallant
Amphigorey, Edward Gorey
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
Dune, Frank Herbert
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Black Diamond and Other Stories, Rachel Ingalls
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Smiley novels, John LeCarre
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood, Patrick Modiano
Isabelo’s Archive, Resil Mojares
From Hell, Alan Moore
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
The Love Object, Selected Stories, Edna O’Brien
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
The Collected Stories, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
Playing With Water, James Hamilton Paterson
Cubao: Pagkagat ng Dilim, Tony Perez
There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The Book of J, translated by David Rosenberg
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Collected Plays, William Shakespeare
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
How to be both, Ali Smith
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
The Door, Magda Szabo
Oliver VII, Antal Szerb
Minotaur, Benjamin Tammuz
The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki
You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There (stories), Elizabeth Taylor
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
The Diaries of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse

We can’t travel just yet, but until then we have our stories. Our first Writing Boot Camp for 2021: Travel Stories. Three sessions in February, Saturdays from 3-6pm on Zoom. Early bird rate until January 30: Php5,000. DM @jessicazafrascats or email saffron.safin@gmail.com to book your place

*No writing experience necessary.
**No one has ever had a nervous breakdown at Writing Boot Camp, although there was much therapeutic weeping at the Memoirs workshop last year.
***Gift certificates available if you want to give the workshop to someone for Lunar New Year.