Welcome to the FTP List
"FTP" stands for F*ck the Patriarchy
This list exists because the voices on Modern Library's Top 100 novels list are overwhelmingly white and male. The FTP list is my attempt to right this wrong. If you have a recommendation for this list, send it my way.
Janie Crawford knows exactly who she is. The world spends most of this novel trying to talk her out of it. Hurston's prose sings in Black vernacular, her characters gossip and love and wound each other, and at the center of it all is a woman claiming her horizon with breathtaking stubbornness. The novel went out of print for decades before Alice Walker helped bring it back. That it almost disappeared is its own kind of crime.
Toni Morrison's Beloved is the most devastating and beautiful novel I have ever read. Set after the Civil War, it follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted - literally - by the trauma of what slavery forced her to do. Morrison demands that you feel every word of it. She read the audiobook herself, exactly as she wanted it heard. Do both if you can.
Octavia Butler wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993 and somehow described this morning's headlines. A collapsed society, normalized cruelty, a government that has abandoned its people. At the center of it is Lauren Olamina, a young Black woman with hyperempathy — she feels other people's pain in her own body — who responds to an unraveling world by building community anyway. Butler was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Genius Grant. She earned it.
In Parable of the Talents, Lauren's community faces its greatest threat yet: an America that has decided cruelty is strength and fear is leadership. Butler wrote this in 1998, including a presidential candidate whose slogan was "make America great again." She was not subtle. She was not wrong. She was extraordinary.
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