Top 100 from 2020

essays, poetry, videos, conversations..

Here’s my top 100 discoveries (in no particular order) of the year - full of recommendations and resources - let me know if you enjoy something from this list!

As always, thank you, profusely, for reading and for all the wonderful support for my Instagram and my newsletter - sharing everything I love with you has been the highlight of my year. I have so much planned for next year and can’t wait to share it with you. Have a wonderful rest of the year and see you soon <3

Livia Falcaru

1. The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson (interview)

2. 9 Poems for This Fraught Moment (poetry)

3. Sex, Death and Mushrooms (essay)

4. Louise Glück, Nobel Prize Interview (interview/video)

5. Tom Whitwell’s 52 things I learned in 2020 (blog)

6. Clarice Lispector, One Day Less (short story)

7. John Berger, Undefeated Despair (essay)

8. Amy Lin, At the Bottom of Everything (newsletter)

9. Jess Zimmerman, Hunger Makes Me (I’ve shared this essay to death and will continue to :))

10. Sayantan Ghosh, Cities Full of Cats (short story)

11. Toxic Nirvana (instagram)

12. SWWIM (literary website)

13. Eula Biss, The Pain Scale (essay)

14. Bruno Penabranca (artist)

15. The Romantic Gestures of 7 Famous Artist Couples (art)

16. 14 Artists on the Importance of Portraying Queer Love (art)

17. Love’s Executive Order (poem of the day website)

18. Women in India: Unheard Stories (feminism)

19. Born into Slavery, Joshua Johnson Became the First Black Professional Artist in the United States (art)

20. The Decameron Project (A project by 29 authors who wrote short stories inspired by the moment in lockdown this year)

21. Raising my Child in a Doomed World (opinion)

22. In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings (Teju Cole)

23. Demonology: A Woman’s Right to Fury

24. My Grandma the poisoner (short story)

25. The Great Women Artists (podcast)

26. Listening to the Joy in James Baldwin’s Record Collection

27. Estefania Loret de Mola (artist)

28. Keith S. Wilson, Heliocentric (poem)

29. Richard Siken’s Editor Pages (essay)

30. in.hair.itance (instagram)

31. Ed Ruscha’s Street View (art)

32. Nadia K. Waheed (artist)

33. Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying (poem)

34. Anne Carson, 1=1 (short story)

35. This whalefall video

36. María Berrío (artist)

37. Mary Oliver reading poetry (video)

38. Gunnhild Øyehaug, Same Time, Another Planet (short story)

39. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (video)

40. James Baldwin and Paul Weiss Debate Discrimination In America (video)

41. Caroline Denervaud (artist)

42. bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (essays/e-book)

43. Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (poem)

44. Dhruvi Acharya (artist)

45. Moonlists (newsletter and journal)

46. Glen Martin Taylor (artist)

47. Clarice Lispector, AGUA VIGA (e-book)

48. Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (short story)

49. Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find (short story)

50. Nasty Magazine (instagram)

51. How to Fail (podcast)

52. Jericho Brown, The Tradition (poetry/e-book)

53. Jhumpa Lahiri, Teach yourself Italian (essay)

54. Jennifer C. Martin, An Homage to Christian Sluts (newsletter)

55. The Linguist (tumblr)

56. Four Way Review (literary website)

57. Miriam Tölke (artist)

58. Hanif Abdurraqib, All Of The Ways I've Kept Myself Alive (video)

59. Past Futures: Nostalgia in the Age of Escapism (video)

60. Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (poetry/e-book)

61. Slowdown Show (poem of the day website)

62. Inevitably Creased (newsletter)

63. Tatyana Tolstaya, Unnecessary Things (short story)

64. Subway Hands (instagram)

65. Holly Warburton (artist)

66. This compilation on love and politics (tumblr)

67. Laura Olin (newsletter)

68. Sabrina Orah Mark, Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over. (essay)

69. Omissions and Outtakes (newsletter)

70. Frida Kahlo’s love letters from an extramarital affair (letters)

71. Marie Howe, Part of Eve’s Discussion (poem)

72. Celebrity Culture is Burning (essay)

73. What Does Love Mean? See How 4-8 Year-Old Kids Describe Love

74. Audre Lorde, Cancer Journals (journal/e-book)

75. Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World (tr. by Clare Cavanaugh) (poem)

76. Bow Down: Women in Art (podcast)

77. Kathy Acker by Mark Magill (interview)

78. Donald Justice’s “There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” (essay/poem)

79. Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems (poems/annotated)

80. Tiny Love Stories (really short stories)

81. Radical Women’s History (instagram)

82. The Doubling of Self: An Interview with Richard Siken (interview)

83. Anne Carson, Decreation (essays/poetry/e-book)

84. This reddit thread about marriage

85. Lyndsey Stonebridge, What history tells us about the refugee crisis (essay)

86. Michael Chabon, The Omega Glory (essay)

87. You should read Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel lecture (essay)

88. Anne Boyer, Garments against Women (lyrical prose/e-book)

89. Ten Ways to Look at the Color Black (art/essay)

90. Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism (essay)

91. How Surrealism Enriches Storytelling About Women (Carmen Maria Machadodiscusses the brilliance of an eerie passage from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House)

92. Hayv Kahraman (artist)

93. Curio Esoterica (instagram)

94. e-flux (online journal of art & criticism)

95. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

96. Kirstin Valdez Quade, Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224) (short story)

97. Discovering Lost Souls (instagram)

98. Ilya Kaminsky, Of Strageness That Wakes Us (essay)

99. Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (essays/e-book)

100. Chicks for Climate (instagram/enviromentalism/feminism)