You could say that our February backlist books all speak to love in its many forms. Like Son toes the line between love story and misguided obsession; Vertigo explores the moments when love fizzles out; The Brick House tells of the love that courses through our dreams and nightmares; In Praise of Defeat is a sprawling, epic profession of love of country; and Sex and Death depicts how love gets diluted in fantasy and escape.
When the two of us first met as bright-eyed booksellers, we bonded over our shared love of books with a particular sadness to them. Works that lay bare the unraveling of the human psyche, the thrill of uncertainty, and the dissolution or desperation of human connection. We may not be traditional romantics, but here are some backlist books that instilled in us a love for written worlds.
Emma & Cristina
Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus (2007) | fiction,
Akashic Books
While many readers would argue that one should never judge a book by its cover, I believe the contrary. If I didn’t, I would never have discovered Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus. Browsing the shelves of an indie bookstore, I distinctly remember pausing to study the portrait of the woman on the cover. Her piercing glare exudes a melancholia and a hopelessness that suggested the book would contain a story so dismal I was asking for my heart to be broken. Set between Los Angeles, Mexico City, and New York, the plot centers on Frank Cruz, a thirty-year-old trans man doomed to recreate his father’s pattern of romantic obsession with the wrong woman. It’s a not-so-simple love story that touches on complicated family relations, limerence, and the disintegration of one’s self-image. We see Frank bond with his dying father, navigate his complicated relationship with his intolerant mother, and explore his entanglement with Nathalie, a beautiful maniac who seems to thrive on the toxicity of their relationship. Lemus is blunt and never sentimental in her prose, but her characters are so compelling it’s easy to be captivated by their stories and relate to the feeling of loving someone so deeply despite the relationship’s impending failure. For those who want to watch havoc and fate collide. —CR
Vertigo by Joanna Walsh (2015) | fiction,
Dorothy, a publishing project
In Vertigo, womanhood is glimpsed through a series of seemingly interconnected stories that will make you want to slow down and let them wash over you, but which you’ll end up devouring in a single sitting. These stories are subtle and quiet, but echoed through me for years after reading. They are so frank about what it means to be a woman—an aging woman, a mediocre woman, a spurned woman, a desirable woman, a woman who is a daughter and a mother, a woman who is a wife and no longer a wife. Walsh blows up the small moments, the nothing moments, reminds us how life breathes through every minute for every person, how the people we pass on the street without a second thought all have their own intricate inner worlds. Tiny observations reveal monumental truths that will make you turn to whoever you’re with and read aloud so you can share in this pointing to something obvious but rarely spoken, from the way a woman might buy a particular dress to feel powerful, to the way a man can easily disregard his children as long as their mother is around. Are these stories about a woman drowning? Or perhaps—about a woman making it to the other shore. For those who like books that split the mundane wide open. —ER
The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (2017) | fiction,
Awst Press
“After death it’s to reality I’ll go. For the time being it’s a dream. A fateful dream. But afterwards—afterwards everything is real.” It would be impossible for me to explain The Brick House without citing the quotation that ends the book, taken from Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm. Micheline Aharonian Marcom employs vignettes and loose fragments to explore the universes we build and destroy in our sleep. Set in a peculiar house on a moor, the novel has no protagonist. Instead, the narrative is propelled by the various tenants, shifting between reality and their nightmares. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the dreams ruminate on feelings of isolation, love, sex, violence, fears of global degradation, and the evils of capitalism, resulting in a mixture of folklore, horror, and erotica. Illuminated in the style of Armenian manuscripts by artist Fowzia Karimi, The Brick House is startling, earthy, and thought-provoking. For those who crave sumptuous storytelling. —CR
In Praise of Defeat: Poems by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2017) | poetry,
Archipelago Books
At 800 pages, this bilingual tome is no small feat from the author or his translator. The book contains a selection of poems chosen by the author of his poetic work from the late 1960s through 2014. Abdellatif Laâbi was an important figure of the Moroccan intelligentsia during the country’s “years of lead,” the repressive period during which many independent thinkers were persecuted, including Laâbi himself, who was tortured and then imprisoned for more than eight years for his political beliefs and writings. Many of the poems in In Praise of Defeat were in fact written while the author was serving his sentence in Kenitra prison, and show the questions Laâbi was asking as a poet in Morocco at this time: how to write resistance, how to dissolve the distinction between the political and the poetic, how the mere act of writing can in itself be a transgressive or dangerous act. Written in “the idiom of exile” through “blood-soaked echoes,” these poems are not only a battle cry for a freer world, but also a deeply personal lament of disorientation by someone dealing with the fallout of colonization in North Africa. In the poem “My Dear Double,” Laâbi explores the instability of his own identity, deploring that “the language of the Other / which I use to express myself / will never be my homeland.” The author’s afterword interrogates the role of a writer in bringing about the collapse of a broken world, ultimately ending on a note of hope for writers and readers in our still-broken world today. For those who need a reminder of the power of the written word. —ER
Sex and Death by Ben Tanzer (2016) | fiction,
Sunnyoutside
This month’s lost treasure—a book that is out of print or otherwise difficult to find—is Sex and Death. I love books like this one, at a mere 72 pages, that are portable but contain multitudes. As the Freudian title suggests, sex and death are central themes, but Tanzer’s use of different contemporary scenarios allows the narrative to delve further into concepts of desire, infidelity, anxiety, restlessness, and self-delusion. “The Look of Love” details the experience of falling in love with an attractive stranger on a plane and the fantasy of planning a potential future with them, capturing the excitement of romantic possibility and the sadness of love that is never fulfilled. In “Taking Flight,” a woman reconnects with her ex-boyfriend on Facebook, who is now married but still interested in her and clearly still unraveling from her rejection of him years earlier. Amidst this internet fantasy, the responsibilities of her banal everyday life fade away while her reputation stays intact. It pains me that I didn’t discover Ben Tanzer’s work sooner, or that of small publishing house Sunnyoutside, but like all good books do, it found me. In just nine stories, this book demonstrates that even the shortest works can give rise to entire universes. For those in search of nostalgia and the thrill of intimacy. —CR