Family is among our most enduring and important institutions. It is a product of our evolutionary past, and therefore written on our DNA.
Real
Documentary and Educational Films
- March of the Penguins, an exploration of how penguins struggle to survive, raise their young and pass life on to the next generation
- March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step (L’Empereur)
True Narratives
Book narratives:
- Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018): “ . . . a meditation on family . . .”
- Charles Wheelan, We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year (Norton, 2021): “Inspired by a backpacking trip he took with Leah in the late ’80s, Wheelan rekindles a longtime wish to reprise this journey with kids in tow. He notes that ‘experiences, rather than things, are what make us happy in the long run,’ because they become an 'ingrained part of our identity.'”
- Russell Shorto, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob (Norton, 2021): “Shorto’s search for his long dead grandfather and namesake, Russell ‘Russ’ Shorto, involves F.B.I. documents, newspaper archives, police records and, most difficult of all, deeply intimate communication with his own father, Tony. Russ, a boss of bookies and tough guys, was a taciturn power broker in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1940s and ’50s whom no one, not even his son, seems to have known very well.”
From the dark side:
- Camilia Kouchner, The Familia Grande: A Memoir (Other Press, 2022), “an indictment of incest that started a national reckoning.”
Imaginary
Visual Arts
- Salvador Dali, Reading. Family Scene by Lamplight (1981)
- Marc Chagall, Fisherman's Family (1968)
- Pablo Picassso, Family (1965)
- Norman Rockwell, A Family Tree (1959)
- Paul Klee, Siblings (1930)
- Egon Schiele, The Family (1918)
- Boris Kustodiev, At Home (1914-18)
- Pavel Filonov, Peasant Family (1910)
- Pablo Picasso, Harlequin's Family (1905)
- Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Woman and Two Children (1901)
- Mary Cassatt, The Family (1893)
- Eduoard Manet, The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874)
- Lawrence Alma-Tadema Roman Family (1868)
- Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Italian Family (1759)
- Antoine Watteau, The Mezzetin's Family (1717)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, Family Group (1666-68)
- Rembrandt van Rijn, The Holy Family Night
- Jacob Jordaens, Self-Portrait Among Parents, Brothers and Sisters (c. 1615)
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Film and Stage
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
The Carter Family recordings are iconic early country music. These are not classically trained musicians but their performances evoke how a singing family with no special musical talent might aspire to sound.
Compositions:
- Dahl, Music for Brass Instruments (1944)
Albums:
- Balimaya Project, “Wolo So”: “Balimaya” means “essence of kinship” in Maninka.
Albums, in the family:
- Slava & Leonard Grigoryan, and Joseph & James Tawadros, “Band of Brothers”
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies: A Novel (Catapult, 2019): “These vignettes are sharp-eyed, sharp-edged and carefully deployed in a multigenerational jigsaw that’s as evasive as it is evocative.”
- Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2020): “Charlotte Perkins, a widow in her early 70s, wins a contest for a Mediterranean cruise, and invites her adult children to come along. Behavior is atrocious. Family secrets are exposed. Reckonings and reconciliations are had.”
- Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel (W.W. Norton, 2020): “An Actress Descends Into Madness, and Her Daughter Picks Up the Pieces”
- Liane Moriarty, Apples Never Fall: A Novel (Henry Holt & Co., 2021): “. . . a wifty tale of domestic suspense, and a satisfying, layered family drama where the tension comes from the treachery of memory, the specter of generational violence and the effects of decades’ worth of unspoken resentments that have curdled over time.”
- Mirian Toews, Fight Night: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2021): “The reader is pulled into the intimacy of a dysfunctional family whose unconditional love would make any truly dysfunctional family jealous. The three women stand alone, together, against the universe, so closely molded against one another’s jagged edges that their individual outlines blur.”
- David Guterson, The Final Case: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022): “In this novel, Guterson is not really writing about who done it, or even why. His subject is family love, and its silent passions grip the reader like a steady, racing current.”
- Monica Ali, Love Marriage: A Novel (Scribner, 2022): “Monica Ali explores the ripple effect of one union on two households with deep secrets.”
- Joseph Han, Nuclear Family: A Novel (Counterpoint, 2022), “is . . . focused on fallout — from war, from family obligation, from all that goes unsaid — and what it takes to move forward after a disaster.”
- Eleanor Brown, Any Other Family: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022): “. . . Eleanor Brown shows how nonstop togetherness can lead to tension, injury and, occasionally, joy.”
- Oscar Hokeah, Calling for a Blanket Dance: A Novel (Algonquin Books, 2022): “At the heart of 'Calling for a Blanket Dance' is a profound reflection on the intergenerational nature of cultural trauma. Hokeah’s characters exist at the intersection of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican identity, which provides a vital exploration of indigeneity in contemporary American letters.”
Poetry
Books of poems:
- Kevin Young, Stones: Poems (Knopf, 2021), “about family, about death and about how families absorb and repurpose loss; the stones here bear names and life spans.”