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.

Richard Strauss, Symphonia Domestica (Sinfonia Domestica), tone poem for orchestra, Op. 53, TrV 209 (1902) (approx. 45 minutes): “Fairy tales often end with the wedding of two lovers and the phrase ‘happily ever after.’ We who live in the real world, however, sometimes wonder what happens after the fairy tale has ended and the hero and heroine have settled down to make a home, have children, and (we hope) lead an exemplary life.” “The Symphonia Domestica is a multi-movement symphony in six continuous and motivically interlaced movements, which describes a twenty-four hour life-cycle in the Strauss famille.” Strauss explained what the work was about: “A day in my family life. It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous – a triple fugue will together portray papa, mama, and baby. . . What can be more serious than family life? I want the Symphonia domestica to be understood seriously.” Top performances are by Furtwängler & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944; Strauss & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944; Krauss & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1951; Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1956; Szell & Cleveland Orchestra in 1964; Mehta & Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968; Kempe & Staatskapelle Dresden in 1972; Karajan & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1973 ***; Zinman & Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in 2002, and Roth & SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg in 2014.

Other compositions:

• Dahl, Music for Brass Instruments (1944)

Albums:

• Balimaya Project, “Wolo So”: “Balimaya” means “essence of kinship” in Maninka.
• Muhal Richard Abrams, “Familytalk” (1992) (70’): “Trumpeter Jack Walrath, Patience Higgins (on tenor, bass clarinet, and English horn), bassist Brad Jones, drummer Reggie Nicholson (who also plays marimba and bells), Warren Smith (vibes, timpani, marimba, and gongs), and Abrams (on piano and synthesizer) all have their spots to interact, and the wide variety of colors that Abrams achieves from this instrumentation is always unpredictable.”

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.”
• Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer: A Novel (Celadon Books, 2022): “The Siblings in This Book Loathe Each Other, and It’s So Refreshing . . . Jean Hanff Korelitz takes on complicated family dynamics, infidelity, race, class, religion, guilt, art and real estate.”
• Catherine Steadman, The Family Game: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2022): “Harriet, a.k.a. Harry, the narrator, has just announced her engagement to the preternaturally rich and charming Edward Holbeck. But surely there’s a better way for her to get to know his relatives than through their annual ‘Krampusnacht’ tradition, which entails being stalked in the dark by a grotesquely hairy, seven-foot-tall homunculus dripping with blood and saliva?”
• Asale Angel-Ajani, A Country You Can Leave: A Novel (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023): “. . . the American-born biracial daughter of a Russian immigrant, wants two things: for her mother, the erudite yet scrappy Yevgenia, to finally see her, and for her mother to leave her alone.”
• Donal Ryan, The Queen of Dirt Island: A Novel (Viking, 2023), “follows an Irish family through several tumultuous decades.”

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.”