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“A deep and howling portrait of longing and loneliness.” —Boston Globe
“A distinctive debut from a promising author.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A stunner from the very first page.” —Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, in the Millions
And praise from Ann Patchett, Alice McDermott, Danielle Evans, Elisa Albert, and Aimee Bender

Populated with lovers who leave and return, with ghosts of the Holocaust and messages from the dead, Courtney Sender’s debut collection speaks in a singular new voice about the longings and loneliness of contemporary love. The world of these fourteen interlocking stories is fiercely real but suffused with magic and myth, dark wit, and distinct humor. Here, ancient loss works its way deep into the psyche of modern characters, stirring their unrelenting lust for life.

In “To Do With the Body,” the Museum of Period Clothes becomes the perfect setting for a bloody crime. In “Lilith in God’s Hands,” Adam’s first wife has an affair in the Garden of Eden. And in the title story, a woman spends her life waiting for any of the men who have left her to come back, only to find them all at her doorstep at once.

For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, and for anyone who has known love and loneliness, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me is a wise and sensual collection of old hauntings, new longings, and unexpected returns, with a finale that is a rousing call to the strength we each have, together or alone.

Marriage and fertility rates are falling around the world, upending social security planning and threatening economic growth. In Love Apocalypse, anthropologists present their insights into this society-altering demographic shift, drawing on their research into the ways love, romantic relationships, and family are being transformed by cultural, social, and economic forces. Each case study in this volume examines a unique cultural context from either Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India), Europe (Germany, Lithuania), or Latin America (Cuba, Peru), grounded in years of ethnographic research into how communities’ experiences and perceptions of love, marriage, and family are changing in response to economic precarity, shifting gender relations, status competition, and diversifying cultural norms. It is increasingly clear that marriage and two-parent nuclear families will not be the universal norm of the twenty-first century even if this arrangement was largely idealized a mere generation ago. However, this does not mean the end of love, intimacy, or family but rather its transformation and the emergence of new intimate relationships and adaptations to the challenges and opportunities of life in the twenty-first century.

Love songs and Hollywood romances make it all sound so simple: You find your soul mate, move in together, get married, never stray from the path of monogamy, and live happily ever after. But real life tends to be more complicated. Many couples pursue alternative living arrangements, and some even pursue alternative loving arrangements.

The twenty-nine personal essays in this collection offer a variety of perspectives and experiences with nontraditional relationships and forms of cohabitation. The contributors include married couples who live in separate cities and single people who find companionship through communes and cohousing. These essays also present varied outlooks on the practice and ethics of having multiple partners, with some embracing large polycules while others opt for “monogamish” relationships. Everyone has a different story to tell, from close friends living together to form a chosen family to couples navigating the shifting boundaries of their relationship as one partner begins a gender transition. With contributors across generations and representing the full ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, Loving Arrangements demonstrates the myriad ways that we live and love today. 

A doomed love story unfolds alongside the production of Psycho in 1950s Bakersfield, California

Muñoz’s debut novel tells the story of Teresa, an aspiring singer too far away from Los Angeles to share the city’s glamour. In Dan Watson, the most desirable man in town, she believes she has found someone to help her realize those dreams. But when a famous actress arrives from Hollywood with a legendary director in tow, local gossip about Teresa and Dan turns to speculation about the celebrity visitors there to work on what will become an iconic, groundbreaking film of madness and murder at a roadside motel: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Framed by a foreword from film critic Charles Taylor, Muñoz’s haunting tale reflects “the slow winding down of everything that once seemed certain.”