For about five years, I became obsessed by the question of erotic possession, of the kind erotic love that would be so powerful it would be difficult to distinguish from a desire for annihilation, especially at times when one’s life seems so settled and easy. Why does this sort of love overtake a person? As I began to write my own novel addressing this theme, I read everything I could find on the subject, including many not listed here. I have become a hobbyist of the question of romantic ruination, and I am now preparing to teach a course on the subject.
James Baldwin’s classic story of erotic doom and betrayal came to me far too late; it’s the sort of book you wish you’d read sooner and then plan to read again.
The novel articulates the real pain of unrequited erotic love—doomed erotic love—narrated by a person accused of not loving enough.
At the opening, we learn that Giovanni is to be executed, and the story unravels the desperate entanglement of two men in Paris in mid-century.
The love in this novel, while passionate, is never far from its opening sense of doom; love is mixed with hate and terror: “this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever.”
When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy.
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love,…
Of the classics of doomed and tumultuous romance that inspired me—including Wuthering Heights,Romeo and Juliet,and Anna Karenina—Madame Bovaryresonates most.
A woman almost infected by the ruinous romances in the novels she reads, she throws her life away for a man entirely unworthy of this kind of sacrifice. What is life for without the threat of ruin?
Emma Bovary doesn’t know, but the reader does know that it will end badly.
Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of a married woman's affair caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. Its heroine, Emma Bovary, is stifled by provincial life as the wife of a doctor. An ardent devourer of sentimental novels, she seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and when real life continues to fail to live up to her romantic expectations, the consequences are devastating. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for…
When I was puzzling through how on earth to write about unreasonable desire, I found many of my unformed thoughts reflected in recent Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux’s very shortSimple Passion.
Ernaux’s narrator records in detail her affair with a man that seemed to possess her for a while, and believes she “could even accept the thought of dying providing [she] had lived this passion through to the very end.”
She becomes, she believes, acquainted with what people are “capable of; in other words, anything.”
It is a passion told dispassionately, and a rare record of what erotic obsession feels like from the perspective of someone who has survived it.
It is also a record of a woman’sdesire, which feels, to me, revolutionary.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.
With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in…
Naga’s beautiful, poetic prose is pervaded with an overwhelming sense that things will end very badly.
An Arab-American woman meets a “boy from Shobrakheit,” and the two begin a damaged, damaging romance in a book that’s been described as a “postcolonial novel for the twenty-first century.”
Desire mixes up with more complicated feelings, such as pity and resentment, feelings that stem from their cultural and class differences, and their relationship, told in alternating points-of-view, is soon touched with a threat of violence—and then more than a threat—of violence.
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a cafe in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants "returning" to a country she's never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire-for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other-takes a…
Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.
It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.
She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.
Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.
Just like Nelson describes wishing to ingest the color blue, not knowing what else to do with its beauty and the longing it produces in her, I sometimes wish I could ingest this book.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color ...A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists. Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007). She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the…
Destructive desire, a brother so psychically contaminated by his twin sister’s sexual life it’s as though her actions are his, a mother who inflames the mutual enmity between her children, social codes as rigid as they are ambiguous: Strange Loops, the second novel by Canadian author Liz Harmer, has the intensity and drive of classic tragedy. The book opens with the main character, Francine—a thirty-three-year-old mother of two, a wife and teacher pursuing a PhD—having an illicit affair with a former student who just turned eighteen. From there, her life unravels with inevitability so fixed it feels damned, as she casts back to the events that led her to this point. Strange Loopsoffers a complex, ethically tangled engagement with the reckonings of “me-too.”
An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.
Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, and holidays.
An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group's key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs
Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private insight into their lives.
Maggie Humm brings together a curated selection of these photographs to offer us a fresh portrait of the Bloomsbury Group, showing them in a new, domestic intimacy. She brings to life the texture of Bloomsbury: their pastimes, children, clothes, houses, servants, pets, holidays. Several photographs are…
