A Lover's Discourse
Fragments
1977 · 234 pages
Waiting in a café for someone who does not come, rereading a letter, saying I love you and hearing it fail: Barthes breaks obsession into figures, each spoken in the lover's voice.
★ 5.2
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Romance of the Rose
1275 · 350 pages
Courtly love as siege warfare: a dreamer enters a garden, and Jean de Meun's vast continuation spends twenty thousand lines besieging one rosebud. Christine de Pizan's attack on it started a centuries-long argument.
★ 6.5
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
1135 · 296 pages
Heloise wrote to Abelard, the Paris philosopher who had been her tutor and lover, years after her uncle's men castrated him. From her abbey she refused to call their love a sin.
★ 6.5
Layli and Majnun
1192 · 320 pages
Qays, an Arab poet, loves Layli so openly that his tribe calls him Majnun, the possessed, and her father marries her elsewhere. Poets from Anatolia to Mughal India rewrote Nezami's version for centuries.
★ 6.5
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
1924 · 60 pages
Neruda was nineteen when these poems appeared, mapping a woman's body onto hills, water, and dusk with a directness that startled readers. Millions of copies later, they are the best-selling poetry in Spanish.
★ 6.5