Alternative Valentine’s Reads

If Only is probably the best existing argument for never embarking on a relationship in your entire life. It is the ultimate in doomed romance, wrongheaded desire, irrational impulses and mangled emotions, and we couldn’t love and desire it more. If you fancy yourself as someone who actively seeks out the unhinged in fiction, then Vigdis Hjorth has seen you coming and will make you regret ever expressing a fondness for such a frivolous thing as ‘an emotional experience’. Ida and Arnold, the wretchedly entwined couple at the centre of this novel, will if nothing else give you a good few excuses to turn to your own beloved partner, should you have one, and say ‘OK but I’m not that bad.’

Exceedingly highly recommended.

The Bridegroom Was a Dog is unapologetically weird, even for Yoko Tawada. Our main character is a schoolteacher that the town at large is already pretty suspect of, escalating dramatically when a strange man moves in with her who seems to have the soul and temperament of a dog. Throw traditional storytelling logic aside for 80 brief pages and prepare for a lot of butt humour. 

Because nothing screams romance like leaving your husband behind to go on a fake roadtrip, sexual odyssey and interior design bonanza all in one! The artist-narrator at the centre of this bone-deeply hilarious novel is experiencing an existential torture like no other, and Miranda July’s excavation of the creative mindset is peerless. Stuffed with vertiginously devastating one-liners and a perfectly counterbalanced amount of crushing ennui, we had an absolute blast reading this instantly iconic book.

In typical Eva Baltasar style, this is an incredibly short, incredibly gut-punching book.

In a kaleidoscopic collection of short vignettes, Permafrost tells the story of its protagonist’s life, her torrid love affairs, her sexual maturation, and her obsessive hatred of pigeons. She moves, seemingly randomly, from Barcelona, to Scotland, and then to Brussels, trying to escape her existential dilemmas and over-obsessions with death.

But it seems to be the pleasure of sex that distances her most from the macabre; for our narrator, it seems to heighten the embodied pleasure of being alive. Rather than pursuing relationships or particular partners, she follows her sexual desires to their ends, no matter how messy or reckless these may be.

This dizzying and beautiful novella details both the extreme loneliness and extreme intimacies of relationships, be they sexual, platonic, or familial.

Haunted Houses follows the lives of 3 young women, passing from adolescence to young adulthood, yet, as Tillman herself puts it, it does so in an entirely ‘unadulterated’ way.

Though Tillman charts the individuation of these 3 young women, her anti-semtimental, gritty style, undermines any sense of easy or binary characterization; Grace, Emily and Jane are an enmeshment of internal voices, at once separable and inseparable from each other. This is not, therefore, a fiction of ‘finding oneself’, but of the conflicts between the individual and institutional. Each protagonist faces the conflict between exceeding patriarchal, heterosexual and capitalist systems and the extent to which these systems rule the forms of desire, thought, and expression that often structure our lives.

At once a complex ethnography, and an understated, gritty and slyly humorous novel, Haunted Houses is one of the best accounts of young womanhood we’ve read!

Ok sure we’re going deliberately as far away from Valentine’s Day as possible for this first pick — couldn’t resist! Female murderers are irresistably fascinating, and this Chilean curio deals with the central theme of its title in a brilliantly creative way, turning the tropes of ‘true crime’ into something rather more profound than merely glamorising the four women it profiles. Detailing their shocking crimes and the repercussions with commentary on the research process itself, Zeran’s methods are exhaustive but eminently readable. A delightful twist on the usual killer commentary! There truly cannot be anything less “Valentine’s Day” than this.

That’s right: a novella about an unsatisfied suburban housewife and her curious, sexy affair with a frogman (yep!!) on the run from his scientist captors. A weird yet profound exploration of freedom, femininity and sexuality. This is one of our all time favourite books at the shop. Do not ignore the frogman’s charm!

An early feminist classic. As the generations go by, “Aunt Lolly” lives in the shadow of each successive Willowes patriarch, slowly subsumed into the confines of familial duty and a stuffy, frigid post-Victorian moral sensibility which she tacitly rejects. Approaching middle age, she suddenly decides (to the horror of her relatives) to move to the Chilterns for a life of solitude, freedom and… witchcraft! A perfect, witty modernist novel and a thorough rejection of society’s expectations of women

Punk, slutty, literary and devastating. Short stories and vignettes come together to form a kaleidoscopic portrait of one night stands, adultery and self-sabotage. This is a filthy, messy, unforgettable love song to queer bodies from a truly singular creative force.

The only author who’s cast a penis hex on customers in our shop… so far! For fans of visceral witchy, feminist poetry and reading about the occult by candlelight.

This is a wild folktale about a disenchanted librarian, a remote summer escape, and, yes, a bear. Escapist, intellectual, sexy, and with just the right amount of archiving content.

This is entirely uncategorizable: part memoir, part epistolary novel, part philosophy. Kraus, an unsuccessful and self described plain artist, meets an academic called Dick, with whom she promptly becomes infatuated and convinces her husband to join her in crafting love letters to him. It sounds even less wild than it is!

Levy is, without a doubt, one of our all time favourite writers, and this is perhaps one of our all time favourite books full stop. The Cost of Living is simply the book on what it means to be a woman making art and the quest for financial, artistic and bodily independence. All three installments of Levy’s “Living Autobiography” are well worth a read, but The Cost of Living is a particularly universal installment, filled with poignant questions and simple pleasures.

Caustic and sharply hilarious, this merciless and perfectly formed novelette is one brilliant monologue, the results of a woman’s single appointment with her doctor – expect blazing ruminations on shame, sex and squirrel tails.

Tired of working long hours in a male-dominated office where she is expected to make coffees and clear away the cups after meetings, Ms Shibata decides on impulse to lie to her colleagues and tell them she is pregnant, and spends the novel sinking deeper and deeper into the lie until we’re left wondering how far she can take it – it’s an exquisite trajectory. You can read this novel as part of a wider and deeply satisfying seam of modern Japanese literature that interrogates the role of women in wider society, but on a purely narrative level the delights are ample: turns of phrase recur and redefine themselves as the book progresses, male behaviour becomes increasingly ungainly and pathetic as the faux-pregnancy becomes more obvious. Hidden beneath the snippy facade there are salient ruminations on the societal pressure placed on women’s bodies, and almost melancholy musings on the futility of opposing the patriarchy.

Addictively mean short stories that were banned in the author’s native Russia – wickedly witty and wince-inducingly cruel in parts, the title of this collection is fair preparation for what’s in store.