Books about love, recommended by Worms
Get some of these swoony reads in over what’s left of summer.
It’s been a big few weeks for our good pals over at Worms. The trendy literary mag has just launched its 10th issue, whose central theme is love in all its strange, tender, radical forms and contradictions – something we certainly need more of right now. To celebrate, we asked editor Caitlin McLoughlin to recommend some books about love (all of which feature in Worms) for us to flick through. Dig in!
Love in Exile by Shon Faye
A personal and resonant exploration of what it means to love and be loved in a system that excludes you from what is presented as “universal”. In an interview with P. Eldridge for Worms, Shon discusses the recent, devastating UK Supreme Court ruling on trans tights, the vulnerabilities of dating while trans and the ethics of memoir.
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
This new memoir follows a year Febos spent celibate, when her understanding of love (perhaps moreso than sex) undergoes revolutionary change. “Love is this amorphous category that was holistic and not discreet from any particular area of my life,” she says. “It is spiritual, creative and corporeal, and all of my important intimate relationships fit into it”.
Name by Constance Debré
In Name, Debré dismantles ideas of family and inheritance. It’s a study of love’s conditionality and the fallacy of “identity”. In an interview with Arcadia Molinas for Worms, she explains that she doesn’t see love as a risk, as so many of us often do.
Modern Love by Constance DeJong
This is a legendary 1977 novel that paved the way for so much of what is celebrated as experimental literature today. Worms founder Clem MacLeod spoke to her for the new issue about the myriad representation of love, the limits of language, and her literary influences.
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza
“For love, for Gaza, words fail” reads the epigraph of Aziza’s memoir, which charts her recovery from anorexia and her family’s Gazan roots. In the new issue of Worms, she reflects on the book’s release, and what it means to write and to love in the midst of a genocide”
