An incendiary tale of sex work from a young literary provocateur.
LOVE
by Maayan Eitan
Penguin Press, April 2022
(via Writers House)
LOVE is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge.
A literary sensation in Israel, Maayan Eitan’s debut set off a firestorm about the relationship between truth and fiction, and the experiences of women under the power of men. Compact and gemlike, this is a contemporary allegory of a young woman on the verge.
“Maayan Eitan is a pensive rebel seductress and a literary trickster. Love, her debut, is celebrated by various deans and kingmakers of Israeli letters as one of the new century’s most important books. Her prose-poem account of life as an underage whore is so emotionally persuasive, so transparently metaphorical, so startlingly concrete, so obviously not true, that it had everyone in Israel convinced it was straight-up autofiction.” —Nell Zink, author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper
Maayan Eitan’s short fiction and essays have been published in The Kenyon Review, World Literature Today, and The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and her work appears regularly in Israeli literary magazines. She holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Hebrew literature in Israel. LOVE is her first book. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In this lush, lyrical debut, Teresa Cepeda is staring down old age alone, estranged from her eldest daughter, Lyra. With her husband missing and her youngest dead, Teresa’s only companion is the petulant ghost of her mother, Amarga. But when an aberrant hurricane makes landfall in San Jose’s Valley, an unexpected visitor—the grandson she love but was never permitted to meet—arrives on her doorstep. Thirty years ago, when Teresa’s husband murdered Amarga and burned the American Fruit Corporation to the ground, Teresa was forced to flee Costa Rica. Now that her grandson is asking questions, will the Cepedas learn why their patriarch committed these shocking acts of violence? Will Lyra finally forgive Teresa for abandoning her and her late sister when they were children? As the hurricane wreaks havoc, the Cepedas will need to reconcile soon—if at all. Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, Where There Was Fire weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption. John Manuel Arias chronicles the rich history of Costa Rica from the civil war in 1948 through the mid-1990s and shows how the lives of one family are intertwined with the tides of history and international politics.
On an early-April dawn in 2003, in a Portland hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby girl comes back to life and turns a vibrant cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rumanni’s beloved soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in a bombing. To Nuha, the girl’s great-aunt, there’s no question that this inexplicable child somehow embodies their sacred family history, when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a famous, unlikely love.
In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.