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What and Who Inspire Elif Shafak

By FindCenter_and_Friends

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Followers

Zainab sat down with the award-winning novelist Elif Shafak for an illuminating discussion on wisdom, knowledge, discovery, and evolving identity. Shafak has an eclectic reading list, and shared with us a few of her favorite writers, teachers, and artists.

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Orlando: A Biography

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I’s court.

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Song of Myself, 51

This poem about discovery, change, and transformation contains Whitman's arguably most famous lines: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

In respect of copyright, we cannot display the poem here. Click the link to read it.

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Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.

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The Masnavi, Book One

Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called "the Koran in Persian." The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better known as the whirling dervishes.

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The Bluest Eye: A Novel

In Morrison’s bestselling first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.

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C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death.

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Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher, and one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the groundbreaking ideas of René Descartes, Spinoza became a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age.

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The Arcades Project

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.

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Brazil

A bureaucrat in a dystopic society becomes an enemy of the state as he pursues the woman of his dreams.

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Alexander Ostrovsky

Alexander Ostrovsky was a Russian playwright, generally considered the greatest representative of the Russian realistic period. "There was a time in my life when I read Russian literature very, very extensively," Shafak says.

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Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch came to New York City from Akron, Ohio, to study at Columbia and NYU's film school. His film Stranger Than Paradise (1984), structured around the Screamin' Jay Hawkins song "I Put A Spell On You," won the Camera D'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.