Anita Felicelli’s award-winning debut short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent delivers a dazzling array of precisely drawn characters searching for identity in the seemingly narrow spaces of their everyday lives. From the glittering heat of India to the palm-lined streets of Silicon Valley, the backwoods of Kentucky to the vanilla-bean fields of Madagascar, immigrants, daughters, and lovers explore love, loss, and reinvention.
Praise for Love Songs for a Lost Continent
“Love Songs “invites the magical to ride up against the mundane, and we end up with very specific portraits that also have that magnetic universality the best literature has.… As a poet and journalist, Felicelli exerts an impressive power over syntax and diction, and so this is one of those collections that I always crave: where dazzling style meets potent substance seamlessly. This is a book we needed to read yesterday; this is a book we will still be reading tomorrow.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick and Sons and Other Flammable Objects
“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
“The thirteen sparkling pieces in Anita Felicelli’s debut collection grapple with the power of fiction itself: the mythologies handed down to us, the false promises of the American dream, and the stories we don’t recognize we’re telling ourselves.”
—Katharine Noel, author of Meantime
“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
“How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were the truth,” declares “Deception,” the opening story in Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent. This logic penetrates the collection; paradigms topple and shift like dominoes as protagonists careen from displacement toward personal truth, each hoping they might find their way.”
—Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers (Starred Review at Foreword Reviews)
“Felicelli has that rare and wonderful quality as a writer: she doesn’t require each story to end neatly, letting the lingering frustration and injustice remain in a reader’s mind, just as they would outside the bounds of fiction…By attempting to get at the heart of painful spaces, by exploring the complex realities of her characters, and by refusing to let any of them emerge from a history-less vacuum, Felicelli seems to be asking us to pause, to consider, to try to understand those around us.”
—Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Felicelli creates a kind of conversation with the reader, allowing one to submerge into her fictional worlds and then return to the surface with new understandings about the world we live in today.”
—S. Kirk Walsh, SF Chronicle
“Anita Felicelli’s best stories are her boldest.”
—Rumaan Alam, NY Times
“At last, someone is telling our stories in a unique and interesting way.”
—Shikha Malaviya, India Currents