FP Author List: Carley Moore Recommends Books About Unrequited Love
In Carley Moore’s PANPOCALYPSE, a woman bikes through NYC, searching for her ex-girlfriend. The city is largely shut down, and Orpheus is lonely, devoid of touch and community. She takes to the streets looking for Eurydice, the first woman she fell in love with, who broke her heart.
In celebration of the novel hitting shelves this Tuesday, we asked Carley to create a list of recommendations of what to read once you finish her book, which all happen to be about unrequited love 💕 (is this a spoiler? you gotta read to find out!)
From Elif Batuman’s THE IDIOT to Pajtim Statovci’s CROSSING, here’s what Carley recommends you read next:
Batuman’s skill at college-age longing is unparalleled. The protagonist Selin’s infatuation with Ivan, an enigmatic, forever unavailable older mathematics student takes her from Harvard to the Hungarian countryside, and remains unresolved until the very end.
(Penguin)
The Sarahs want so much—love, sex, food, freedom, men, women, money, and ultimately to rid themselves of all the baggage, history, and semiotics embedded in the name “Sarah.” I love this collection of short stories, all linked by the name Sarah, and in “Exorcism or Eating my Twin,” I felt the familiar tug and failure of queer longing that has always resonated deeply for me.
(Grand Central Publishing)
Ava, a Dubliner residing in Hong Kong and scraping by teaching English to rich children, falls for the cold and cruel English banker Julian. Mirroring his coldness in exchange for free housing, Ava seems in control until she meets Edith, a beautiful, driven, Hong Kong–born lawyer. Who will she choose? The novel keeps us on edge until the very last page.
(HarperCollins)
Is there anyone who Darryl doesn’t covet in some way? In this brilliant and hilarious novel, Ess explores cuckolding and swinging through the eyes of Darryl, a man who seems to have it all. The surprising queer relationship that Darryl forms with Bill turns this novel into something beautiful and hopeful.
(CLASH Books)
There is so much longing and unreciprocated love in these books. Stefano for Lila. Lenu for Nino. But perhaps the most unspoken, unrequited love of the whole series is between Lila and Lenu, best friends, staunch allies, sometimes enemies, and at times estranged from one another.
(Europa Editions)
Affection of any sort is hard to come by for Aroon St. Charles in this tragicomedy set in Ireland after World War I. As the family slips into genteel poverty, Aroon grows up with hardly a physical touch or glance from her mother, and an abundance of fat jokes from her father and brother. Aroon’s pining for Richard, her brother’s best friend, is especially painful and teenage in all of its longings and flailings.
(NYRB)
Edie, one of my favorite protagonists of all time, begins an open, casual relationship with Eric, an older man living in New Jersey with his wife and adopted kid. Leilani expertly ramps up the action and the stakes by putting Edie in increasingly precarious financial and emotional situations, all while she tries to get Eric’s attention.
(Picador)
Lilia Liska, the prickly protagonist of this exacting and beautiful novel, spends her time in a nursing home, reflecting on her three husbands, five children, and seventeen grandchildren. Her obsession, however, is with a man she had a brief affair with in her late teens, Roland Bouley. Li is the master of stories about grief, and in Lilia, she constructs a woman who is undone by the suicide of her daughter Lucy, Roland’s illegitimate child, and determined to create a written record of the truth before she dies.
(Random House)
Though not a romantic relationship, Magda—a writer married to an academic in Communist Hungary—struggles to understand and control her housekeeper, Emerence, an illiterate peasant who harbors a dark secret in her house. What I love about this book is the characters’ power struggles and longing to each be understood by the other, in spite of all of their differences.
(NYRB)
In one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever read, Bujar, a queer Albanian refugee, is forever marked and tormented by his childhood love for a neighbor boy, Agim. Refusing fixed ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity, Statovci constructs a novel of queer longing, survival, and displacement.
(Knopf Doubleday)
About Carley Moore:
Carley Moore is the author of the essay collection 16 Pills, the poetry chapbook Portal Poem, the young adult novel The Stalker Chronicles, and the fiction novel The Not Wives, published by the Feminist Press in 2019. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Brainchild, the Brooklyn Rail, the Journal of Popular Culture, and others. She is a clinical professor of writing and contemporary culture and creative production in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University and a senior associate at Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She lives in Brooklyn.
Buy Carley’s books:
Carley Moore
A novel of sex-positive awakening and burgeoning political resistance, set in Occupy-era New York City.
Carley Moore
During the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman bikes through a locked-down NYC for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
