Love

De: Maayan Eitan

Narrado por: Gilli Messer

Winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation

An incendiary tale of sex work from a young literary provocateur

Love is a fever dream of a novel about a young sex worker whose life blurs the boundaries between violence and intimacy, objectification and real love. Startlingly vulnerable and lyrically deft, Maayan Eitan’s debut follows Libby as she goes about her work in a nameless Israeli city, riding in cars, seeing clients, meeting and befriending other sex workers and pimps. In prose as crystalline as it is unflinching, Eitan brings us into the mind of her fierce protagonist, as Libby spins a series of fictions to tell herself, and others, in order to negotiate her life under the gaze of men. After long nights of slipping in and out of the beds of strangers, in a shocking moment of violence, she seizes control of her narrative and then labors to construct a life that resembles normalcy. But as she pursues love, it continually eludes her. She discovers that her past nights in cheap hotel rooms eerily resemble the more conventional life she’s trying to forge.

A literary sensation in Israel, Maayan Eitan’s debut set off a firestorm about the relationship between truth and fiction, and the experiences of women under the power of men. Compact and gemlike, this is a contemporary allegory of a young woman on the verge.

Reseñas de la Crítica

One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022

“Love stands as a moving, revealing book that manages to bring something of its uneasy, important fictive world into the real experience of reading it . . . Eitan never wavers in her commitment to authenticity.” —Chicago Review of Books

“I swallowed Love in a single, sumptuous gulp. Eitan's lyric prose is both lushly beautiful and whittled needle-sharp. I couldn't (and didn't want to) turn away from its sting.” —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

“Maayan Eitan is a pensive rebel seductress and a literary trickster. Love, her debut, is celebrated by various deans and kingmakers of Israeli letters as one of the new century’s most important books. Her prose-poem account of life as an underage whore is so emotionally persuasive, so transparently metaphorical, so startlingly concrete, so obviously not true, that it had everyone in Israel convinced it was straight-up autofiction.” —Nell Zink, author of Mislaid

"Intensely vivid, lyrical, and raw, Eitan’s debut is as disturbing as it is moving." —Kirkus

“It’s slim, but it seems like it couldn’t be any other way. . . . The effect caused by Love, the intellectual and emotional journey its readers go through, leaves them panting, their hearts beating hard." —Gili Izikovich, Haaretz Arts and Culture

"[Love] is written with stunning talent." —Dan Miron, Haaretz Literary Supplement

"A radiant debut." —3:AM Magazine