We wanted so badly to be clever about love for today’s list. It being Valentine’s Day tomorrow, all those schmaltzy jewelry commercials are on TV; if we see another saccharine Hallmark card, we might self-destruct. A list of the 10 best anti-love novels or the most memorable characters wreaking revenge on hurtful lovers might have been an antidote to the commercialized ritual of love we all undergo this week. But when we started filing through the Kirkus archive, we kept saying “awww” and sighing while recalling love stories we unironically, unabashedly admire. So we’ll toss the clever façade: here are the 10 love stories we don’t ever want to forget.
FICTION
Released: Oct. 11, 2011
"Dazzling work—Eugenides continues to show that he is one of the finest of contemporary novelists."
A stunning novel—erudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 7, 2010
"Alternate universes, too."
If Harry Potter lived in an alternate Ireland, had no real magical powers but talked a good game, and fell all over himself every time he saw a girl, he might well belong in this splendid, sardonic magnum opus.
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NONFICTION
Released: Jan. 19, 2010
"Riveting and exquisitely crafted."
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (
Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and '70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 1, 2004
"Robinson has composed, with its cascading perfections of symbols, a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering."
The wait since 1981 and
Housekeeping is over. Robinson returns with a second novel that, however quiet in tone and however delicate of step, will do no less than tell the story of America--and break your heart.
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FICTION
Released: Feb. 4, 2002
" Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters's virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel."
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you'll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters's impudent revisionist historicals:
Tipping the Velvet (1999),
Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
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FICTION
Released: Feb. 6, 2001
"A quiet debut, its very understatement giving rise to its poignancy and strength."
With subtlety and grace, a first novel--actually a series of eight linked, chronologically arranged stories--illuminates momentous if commonplace events in the lives of a modern New England family.
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