What is love?
This was the question African American feminist and writer bell hooks posed in her seminal 1999 text All About Love: New Visions. While love is often understood as a feeling, hooks challenged us to think of love as a verb, something that requires intention and will.
This is a list of books that take love up as their subject in order to question dominant narratives and offer new visions.
In All About Love, bell hooks emboldened a generation of thinkers to interrogate the ways we love. She challenges our received wisdom about love and urges us to approach one another with compassion in service of a love bound up with collective liberation.
Novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch returns to the theme of love in her books as a radical, almost supernatural experience of another’s humanity, and all that that entails. In The Sea, the Sea, the aging protagonist’s commitment to hermetic exile from society is upended when he unexpectedly runs into a lover from his past.
Midcentury psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues that people suffer tremendously from alienation. The Art of Loving ultimately comes to some of the same conclusions as hooks about our widespread incapacity to truly love and the need to practice love as an art or discipline.
Love's Work is a generous memoir that details Gillian Rose’s reflections on love, death and spirituality during the battle with cancer that ultimately took her life. Rose rejects sterilized perspectives on love and rather positions love as the difficult and rewarding work of a lifetime.
The brilliant Maggie Nelson spins theory from her personal experiences of starting a family with her genderfluid partner in The Argonauts. Questions of desire, identity, and the constantly-renewing labor of love are worked through beautifully and challengingly.
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