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)

Film and Stage

• Wild Bill: an ex-convict eventually comes to value his teenage sons

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.”

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.”