7 Published Works To read if you like These Movies and tv Shows
7 Published Works To Read if you like These Movies and tv Shows
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Gas Station Ice Cream - Sacha Yuan
“They sacrificed their own needs to satisfy their daughter’s wants.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: Minari (2020) • Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
Yuan’s work navigates the challenges of a dedication to family and tradition in the benign trials of everyday life. The titled nostalgic dessert serves as a thematic focus for contemplations of cultural sacrifice and expectations that are passed between generations. Gas Station Ice Cream follows the guilt, gratitude, and spite associated with expectations that are too high or seemingly unattainable. The CNF work allows readers to connect with the mentioned films, and others like it, that allows auda sense of closure.
Further Reading from Behemoth Archives: Jefferson Beavers’ poem Grandma Dorothy Came To Me in a Dream, UV’s poem Describe Your Parents Hands, and David Anson Lee’s My Mother Hides the Moon in a Rice Bowl.
Curtains - ANDY ORAM
“We could spend hours unviewed by anyone who might trespass our latitude, Leaving us at peace, our course unclocked.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: The Truman Show (1998) • Severance (2022)
What would it mean to disappear without losing visibility? The poem opens with a historical description from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in 2018. Oram’s poem considers privacy and secrecy as an elevated form of solitude. The writer uses the vast ocean as a symbol of refuge, a place where individuals may go unnoticed and unrecorded, before the juxtaposition of returning to the judging eyes and ears in civilization. The poem’s focus on visibility is reminiscent of the Jim Carrey’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which the protagonists life is filmed entertainment without the subject’s consent, as well as the Apple TV+ series Severence where identity could be managed and controlled. Curtains embraces moments of privacy as a temporary shelter, a place where individuals may briefly step away from the public expectations and puppetry.
Further Reading from Behemoth Archives: Andriy Nivchuk’s Reprint.
Highs and Lows - Seth ERvin
“The only illumination was the flickering streetlight at the end of the alley, but it ended just before my feet, cementing that I was unlikely to be found before morning.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: The Maltese Falcon (1941) • Chinatown (1974) • Spider-Man Noir (2026)
Rain, blood, a private investigator, and a city that keeps its secrets buried. Highs and Lows follows John, a hard-bitten detective whose investigation into the suspicious death of a young woman leads from a rehabilitation clinic to an underground drug cult. The story wears its noir influences on its sleeve; drawing on the moral ambiguity of Spider-Man Noir, the cynical detective work of The Maltese Falcon, and the labyrinthine corruption of Chinatown. Yet beneath all the grime, an intimate tragedy emerges. Like the best noir; the investigation’s conclusion matters less for what John discovers than for what the discovery reveals about the city, its inhabitants, and the lengths people will go to in order to preserve what they have already lost.
Further reading from Behemoth Archives: Ervin’s additional published essay Smothering America’s Soul.
“upload a video of your upward and downward nods with a paragraph explaining the appropriate context for each.”
For readers who enjoyed: Get Out (2017) • The Menu (2022) • Atlanta (2016) • Portlandia (2011)
Little things are more revealing about an establishment than the taken survey prior to deciding your acceptance in. Matthew E. Henry’s work To Obtain a Submission Waiver for Black Authors imagines the submission process of a literary publication as an progressively elaborate test of Black authenticity. In the satirical formatted work, surveyed applicants must prove that they have the proper knowledge of cultural references, experiences, and relationship to cultural stereotypes before they are given the opportunity of having their work read reminescent of Portlandia’s ridiculous bureaucratic obsessions. While rather humorous in theory, some of the questions can be rather imbued in facts. The thematic elements of power in relation to race found in the fictional work can be comparable to episodes of Atlanta, The Boondocks, and Get Out. Behind Henry’s comments about the ludacris demands recognizable to writers in the literary and academic communities of focusing on verifying an author’s identity instead of reading the submitted work.
Further Reading from Behemoth Archives: Zoé Mahfouz’s WE are the Elitist Leftist Literary Magazine The Pushcart Prize Committee adores, and therefore so do You,
Costume of The Asset creature from Guilermo Del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water on Display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures | Photo Credit: Scott Knoll
Love is Deafblind - Paul Hostovsky
“The only illumination was the flickering streetlight at the end of the alley, but it ended just before my feet, cementing that I was unlikely to be found before morning.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: A Silent Voice • CODA • The Shape of Water
Love is DeafBlind is a creative non-fiction work that shares the importance of literature as a form of advocacy, particularly in its abillity to create space for communication and sharing lives that are often overlooked. Following a writer’s account of their friendship with a woman that is Deaf blind, the memoir highlights on how relationships may progress beyond conventional speech. The writer shares the experience of human connection and intellectual growth through palpable fingerspelling and braille to letters, touch, and memory.
What begins as a basic exercise of understanding human behavior in communication gradually becomes something closer to attrition. A meditation on loss, connection, and remembrance similar to works that focus on the deaf and blind community such as CODA and A Silent Voice, and The Shape of Water. Hostovsky finds tenderness in shared relationship that resists ease of comfort from verbal communication. It addresses a softened state that humans may have in terms of facing loneliness and companionship without way of allowing to express it.
Miller - Kim Rapopart
“That declaration of love is cheesy, but seventeen-year-old girls are into cheese.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: The Spectacular Now • Eighth Grade • The Edge of Seventeen • It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Filmmaker Kim Rapoport’s fictional work Miller is a romantic comedy formed by bruised intamacy, awkward adolencene, and the misdirections of young relationships similar to the intimacy of media like: The Spectacular Now, Eighth Grade, The Edge of Seventeen, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Miller is a coming-of-age flash fiction piece following a protagonist sharing her time in a relationship with the titular character, revisiting memories that have taken different weight over time. As the protagonist reflects on their romance, they are forced to remember a high demand of patience that it required when listening to his high demand of aspirations. Through humor, and gained wisdom, the work explores the roles that people may assume in relationships, how we remember people we once loved, and how time causes us to revisit those feelings with a different perspective.
Further reading from Behemoth Archives: Dawn Parker’s poem Ode to Bloody Knuckles, Baskin Cooper’s poem Blackbeard’s Lass, and Chris Cochran’s Cart Kids.
“Машина времени (Time Machine)” by Russian photographer, Artem Bezmaternykh in Behemoth Magazine Issue I: The Awakening
Recommendation for Myself - Timothy Skeen
“I am adaptable to various environments as long as I am required to stay at home and write letters while listening to The Ventures.”
For Readers who Enjoyed: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty • The Royal Tenenbaums • Curb Your Enthusiasm • The Office
In the strange navigation of the current digital age, where our interaction with artifical intelligence has shaped how progressively abandon of human-made works, Recommendation for Myself is a mock job reference written inward to forcibly analyze itself. Conventional, hands-on skills have become outdated and difficult to distinguish from peculiar habits that now occupy the protagonist of the poetic works life. A criticism of how those peculiar habits that have made acceptable substitutes for polished credentials. Skeen’s poem is a satirical work that finds humor in the awkwardness of an ordinary life and the strange gap of how imagine ourselves as professinals. It’s writing style is reminescent of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Royal Tenenbaums, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the Office, revealing uncomfortable absurdity from a protagonist that is becoming well aware of how ridiculous his circumstances have become.
Further reading from Behemoth Archives: Barlow Crassmont’s Next Year’s Reflections, Mark Connelly’s Devlin’s Delights, and David Martinez’s Time Takes a Cigarette.