Writing Love

One of E! News' 13 Books to Read This September | One of Bookish's Debuts to Read in the Second Half of 2021 | One of Medium's Best Releases Out Today “Hazel Hayes writes with such honesty and casual confidence and flowing dialogue, you feel you are overhearing it rather than reading it. The writing sparkles with wit and a poignant emotional reality. I love it.”—Matt Haig, bestselling author of The Midnight Library “A smart, touching, time-bending romance. Funny and affecting.”—David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day and Sweet Sorrow For anyone who has loved and lost, and lived to tell the tale, this gorgeously written debut is a love story told in reverse, a modern novel with the heart of a classic: truthful, tragic, and ultimately full of hope. Out of Love begins at the end. A couple call it quits after nearly five years, and while holding a box of her ex-boyfriend’s belongings, the young woman wonders: How could they have spent so long together? When did they fall out of love? Were there good times before the bad? These are the questions we obsess over when a relationship ends, even when obsessing can do no good. But instead of moving forward through the emotional fallout of a break-up, Out of Love moves backward in time, weaving together an already unraveled tapestry, from tragic ending to magical first kiss. Each chapter jumps further into the past, mining their history for the days and details that might help us understand love; how it happens and why it sometimes falls apart. Readers of Normal People; Goodbye, Vitamin; and One Day will adore this bittersweet romance, a sparkling debut that you won’t want to miss.

When Nina Mistry's life hits rock bottom, she decides to change her stars by falling in love...with herself--a hilarious, heartfelt story from outrageously funny novelist Radhika Sanghani. Nina didn't plan to spend her thirtieth birthday in jail, yet here she is in her pajamas, locked in a holding cell. There's no Wi-Fi, no wine, no carbs--and no one to celebrate with. Unfortunately, it gives Nina plenty of time to reflect on how screwed up her life is. She's just broken up with her fiancé, and now has to move back into her childhood home to live with her depressed older brother and their uptight, traditional Indian mother. Her career as a freelance journalist isn't going in the direction she wants, and all her friends are too busy being successful to hang out with her. Just as Nina falls into despair, a book lands in her cell: How to Fix Your Shitty Life by Loving Yourself. It must be destiny. With literally nothing left to lose, Nina makes a life-changing decision to embark on a self-love journey. By her next birthday, she's going to find thirty things she loves about herself.

In 2014, 33-year- old Mandy Len Catron went on a date with an acquaintance. They decided to try an experiment: inspired by a study designed to create romantic feelings, Mandy and Mark spent the evening asking each other 36 increasingly intimate questions, wondering if it would lead to them falling in love. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone, this experiment is Catron’s starting point for investigating what it means to love someone and to be loved, and how we present our love to the world. What makes love last? Can love ever work the way it seems to in films, books and social media? Is there a “right” way to fall in love? In these candid, charming and wise essays, Catron blends memoir with cultural and social commentary on the psychology, biology, history and literature of love. How to Fall in Love with Anyone is a deeply personal, yet universal investigation into the one thing we all want—or think we want—more than anything. Includes “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This”, one of the most popular essays to appear in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column “In our age of total romantic confusion, Mandy Len Catron is a voice of good sense, warm humor, and consoling wisdom. Through the lens of her own relationships, she teaches us—with a deft, convincing intelligence—some of the vital moves in the art of love.” —Alain de Botton, internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Course of Love MANDY LEN CATRON lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. She writes about love and love stories at The Love Story Project, and teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "[A] poetic reckoning of the importance of love in a child's life . . . eloquent and moving."—People "Everything that can be called love -- from shared joy to comfort in the darkness -- is gathered in the pages of this reassuring, refreshingly honest picture book."—The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review “Lyrical and sensitive, ‘Love’ is the sort of book likely to leave readers of all ages a little tremulous, and brimming with feeling.”—The Wall Street Journal From Newbery Medal-winning author Matt de la Peña and bestselling illustrator Loren Long comes a story about the strongest bond there is and the diverse and powerful ways it connects us all. "In the beginning there is light and two wide-eyed figures standing near the foot of your bed and the sound of their voices is love. ... A cab driver plays love softly on his radio while you bounce in back with the bumps of the city and everything smells new, and it smells like life." In this heartfelt celebration of love, Newbery Medal-winning author Matt de la Peña and bestselling illustrator Loren Long depict the many ways we experience this universal bond, which carries us from the day we are born throughout the years of our childhood and beyond. With a lyrical text that's soothing and inspiring, this tender tale is a needed comfort and a new classic that will resonate with readers of every age.

In this compelling new addition to Sandra M. Gilbert's Ad Feminam: Women and Literature series, Katharine Ann Jensen examines the cultural form of the love letter and its intersection with the novel in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women writers. Traditionally, French literary history has focused on eighteenth-century male writers Rousseau and Laclos as the master artists of the epistolary novel. That emphasis on one century, one gender, and one epistolary form--the novel--obscures the history of women's writing in France. In the seventeenth century, the love letter was viewed as a feminine literary form in which a woman's passionate and emotional "nature" found its logical expression. Such emotional writing was criticized for its structural and grammatical imperfections, rendering it--in the eyes of men--invalid as true "literary" material. However, men often wrote under female pseudonyms, composing letters of seduction and betrayal that were published as true accounts. Jensen contends that men disguised their words as women's words because writing as women allowed them to experiment with narrative fiction at a time when men's writing was rigidly defined by classical rhetoric. She further argues that men were able to moderate women's linguistic strengths by limiting their epistolary expertise to a social, rather than literary, practice, thereby maintaining literature as an almost exclusively male province. Jensen argues for a tradition of women's writing by examining both the love letters and novels of such writers as Desjardins, Ferrand, Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Lespinasse. In her novel Les Désordres de l'amour, Desjardins (Madame de Villedieu) creates an ambitious, letter-writing heroine. Through an analysis of the textual similarities between the heroine's letters and Desjardins's personal love letters to her unfaithful lover, Jensen concludes that Desjardins rewrites her own unfortunate epistolary relationship. Jensen draws similar conclusions from an examination of the personal letters of Ferrand in relation to her novel Histoire des amours de Cléante et de Bélise. In order to chart the legacy of seventeenth-century feminine epistolarity, Jensen goes on to consider the works of eighteenth-century French women writers. Like Desjardins's novel, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistress Fanni Butlerd present letter-writing heroines who overturn the conventions of seduction and betrayal in order to claim their independence and desire to write. This desire correlates to Graffigny's and Riccoboni's own writing ambitions, thereby asserting the ability of women to write self-consciously, rather than emotionally, and to create narrative fiction rather than cyclical letters of love and suffering. Jensen demonstrates that these assertions constitute a significant break with seventeenth-century ideas about feminine letter writing that inextricably bind women to a supposedly natural language of sexual and literary disempowerment. This important and insightful book will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of scholars in French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies, feminist studies, epistolary fiction, and novel and narrative studies.

Are you wondering what the next killer app will be? Do you want to know how you can maintain and add to your value during these rapidly changing times? Are you wondering how the word love can even be used in the context of business? Instead of wondering, read this book and find out how to become a lovecat—a nice, smart person who succeeds in business and in life. How do you become a lovecat? By sharing your intangibles. By that I mean: Your knowledge: everything that comes from all the books that I’ll encourage you to devour. Your network: the collection of friends and contacts you now have, which I’ll teach you how to grow and nurture. Your compassion: that human warmth you already possess—in these pages I’ll convince you that you can show it freely at the office. What happens when you do all this? * You become a rich source of information to all around you. * You are seen as a person with valuable insight. * You are perceived as generous to a fault, producing surprise and delight. * You double your business intelligence in one year. * You triple your network of personal relationships in two years. * You quadruple the number of colleagues in your life who love you like family. In short, you become one of those amazing, outstanding people to whom everyone turns, who leads rather than follows, who never runs out of ideas, contacts, or friendship. Here’s the real scoop: Nice guys don’t finish last. They rule!

Hoping to save his family, one man enters his realm's most glorious tournament and finds himself in the middle of a political chess game, unthinkable bloodshed, and an unexpected romance with a woman he's not supposed to want.

This beautiful novel from the author of Marcelo in the Real World about life after a suicide attempt is perfect for fans of It's Kind of a Funny Story and Thirteen Reasons Why. When Vicky Cruz wakes up in the Lakeview Hospital Mental Disorders ward, she knows one thing: After her suicide attempt, she shouldn't be alive. But then she meets Mona, the live wire; Gabriel, the saint; E.M., always angry; and Dr. Desai, a quiet force. With stories and honesty, kindness and hard work, they push her to reconsider her life before Lakeview, and offer her an acceptance she's never had.But Vicky's newfound peace is as fragile as the roses that grow around the hospital. And when a crisis forces the group to split up, sending Vicky back to the life that drove her to suicide, she must try to find her own courage and strength. She may not have them. She doesn't know.Inspired in part by the author's own experience with depression, The Memory of Light is the rare young adult novel that focuses not on the events leading up to a suicide attempt, but the recovery from one -- about living when life doesn't seem worth it, and how we go on anyway.