Love Songs for a Lost Continent
"This is the book we needed to read yesterday... a book we will still be reading tomorrow."
- Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick and Sons and Other Flammable Objects
From the glittering heat of India's Pink City to the palm-lined streets of Silicon Valley and the vanilla-bean fields of Madagascar, Anita Felicelli's debut collection delivers a dazzling array of precisely drawn characters searching for identity in the seemingly narrow spaces of their everyday lives.
Imbued with magic, Felicelli's stories center on first- and second-generation Tamil Americans--immigrants, daughters, and lovers exploring what it means to lose and to love, to continually reinvent oneself while honoring the personal histories and lost continents that shape us all.
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"Love Songs for a Lost Continent is an expansive, inventive meditation on the shifting landscape of identity, on how people can be shaped and reshaped by violence and power and love. Anita Felicelli has a singular eye for the moments that transfigure lives, and this tremendous debut collection announces the arrival of a stunning new voice."
- Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
"Love Songs for a Lost Continent is the kind of work that we all need to be reading right now. Filled with heart and heat, these beautiful stories pursue and reinvent ideas of home and self in ways that push our national conversation on identity."
- Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Pioneer Girl and Stealing Buddha's Dinner
"Tigers, swans and rampion--Anita Felicelli's Love Songs for a Lost Continent captures the senses with skillful explorations of sexual being and human vulnerability. This collection not only rallies the imagination, it challenges the intellectual self and the diverse self. A beautifully rendered collection, both enchanting and lyrical."
- Rae Bryant, author of The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals and editor of Eckleburg
"Surprising, surreal sometimes, and strong in theme and exploration, these stories probe the limits of love, the fluidity of home, and the pressures and resistance of women in a patriarchal landscape without ever losing humor, engagement, and a quiet elegance and tenderness. They move with assurance through ideas, themes, and landscapes revealing what is new within what might have been expected. A very strong debut."
- Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face, Cartography of the Void
"This is a wild, startling collection about loss, migration, colonization, and constantly shifting identities. What does it mean to be an outsider, and where does our power really lie? For the characters in Love Songs for a Lost Continent, living and loving in the margins is as precarious as a tightrope walk."
- Chaitali Sen, author of The Pathless Sky
"Love Songs for a Lost Continent defies expectation. You'll think you're being led into a narrative that's comfortably familiar, but instead will find work that pushes boundaries, redefines freedoms both personal and artistic. Like her character Vikrant, the elephant polo star, Anita Felicelli will hook her arm into yours and run with you through an India, an America, a history and future that ring with truth and radical growth."
- Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy and The Prayer Room
