A Moby-Dick Reading List

A Moby-Dick Reading List

This article relates to Wild and Distant Seas

Whether you love Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, hate it or have never read it, you may find yourself unable to escape it. Even for a classic, it shows surprising reach, having inspired and influenced numerous authors, artists and scholars, historical and contemporary. Published in 1851, it continues to be deconstructed, reconstructed, analyzed, interpreted, adapted and added to, with one example of a literary spin-off being Tara Karr Roberts' debut Wild and Distant Seas, which follows four generations of women linked to the book's main character Ishmael. Below are just a few of the many other pieces of writing, both short and long, fiction and non-fiction, that interact with or cast their gaze on Melville's iconic novel.

One work that emphasizes the volume and depth of Moby-Dick and Melville scholarship in existence is Dayswork (2023) by acclaimed novelist Chris Bachelder and award-winning poet Jennifer Habel. In this unique book of fiction that includes many intriguing factual tidbits and is broken into short paragraphs resembling poetry, an unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with Melville's work and life, sharing her thoughts and discoveries with the reader as she also navigates marriage, aging, Covid-19 and family issues. Dayswork is a feast of American literary history, drawing on the writing and experiences of not just Melville but also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Emily Dickinson and others.

Anthony Veasna So's posthumous debut short story collection Afterparties (2021) contains the ambitious, hilarious and strange "Human Development," in which the main character, a young man named Anthony, opts to deviate from the expected curriculum at his job teaching high school students about being socially and politically conscious, believing that he can provide them with important life lessons through Moby-Dick. In the meantime, he meets Ben, a fellow Cambodian American gay man whose enthusiastic identity-based politics begin to grate on Anthony as soon as the two start a romantic relationship. "Human Development" is about the harm of the model minority myth, but also wrestling with the limitations of one's hangups and self-imposed worldview.

Patrick Ness's And the Ocean Was Our Sky (2018), an experimental, genre-bending young adult novel illustrated by Rovina Cai, subverts the tale of Moby-Dick by taking on the perspective of a pod of whales who seek to protect themselves in a long-established war with humans. The whale Bathsheba comes to question the orders given to her by her captain, wondering about her purpose and role in the ongoing conflict.

In a fascinating essay for Lit Hub, "The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick," writer Gabrielle Bellot touches on Melville's use of color in the novel, as well as its significance to racism and race in America, noting that "its references to whiteness and blackness are [...] connected to race, both explicitly and implicitly. [...] In many ways, it is a template for Melville's, and our, America: a world populated as much with gestures towards racial equality as with casual racist assumptions." In this exploration, Bellot references and builds on Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, a formative analysis of race in American literature that also mentions Melville.

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to Wild and Distant Seas. It originally ran in February 2024 and has been updated for the January 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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