Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, 1597
Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
Books about love
The books here take love seriously as a force that shapes families, friendships and whole towns, and they show its cost as plainly as its warmth. In «Όλα για την αγάπη», bell hooks asks why we talk so little about love and what it would take to practise it, while Little Women follows four sisters through work, quarrels and affection in a New England town that feels like your own street. Pick one up when you want company in thinking about how people care for each other, and how often they get it wrong.
A page that shows it
The wish to make someone so bright the sun becomes an insult.
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,Think true love acted simple modesty.Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;For thou wilt lie upon the wings of nightWhiter than new snow on a raven’s back.Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,Take him and cut him out in little stars,And he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with nightAnd pay no worship to the garish sun. -
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Ιλιάδα
Όμηρος, -750
A war ten years old and still not won: the quarrel, the losses, and the two impossible choices that keep people fighting.
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë, 1847
A storm of a love story told by two unreliable narrators, in which childhood devotion curdles into revenge across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
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Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen, 1811
Two sisters, one who feels everything and one who shows nothing, discover what each kind of restraint costs and conceals.
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Όλα για την αγάπη
bell hooks, 2000
Μια ποιήτρια και στοχαστική που έμαθε την αγάπη από την απουσία της εξηγεί γιατί μιλάμε τόσο λίγο γι' αυτήν, και πώς να την κάνουμε πράξη.
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Ugly Love
Colleen Hoover, 2014
A nurse restarting her life falls for a man who offers only sex and no past—and discovers how much pain can hide behind a closed door.
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Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare, 1602
Shipwreck, disguise and a household in mourning: a comedy where everyone loves the wrong person and the fool is the only one telling the truth.
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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Four sisters, one thin purse and a long war, learning to work, quarrel, write and love in a New England town that feels like your own street.
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Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn, 2012
A marriage goes wrong in a Missouri river town, and every account of it is suspect. Read it for the voice, the fury, and the cool-eyed dread.
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Great Expectations
Charles Dickens, 1861
A blacksmith's orphan is made rich by a stranger, and finds out what money does to love, friendship and memory.
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1878
A society novel about a marriage coming apart and a landowner trying to build a meaningful life, full of dinner tables, fields, jealousy and philosophy.
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Othello
William Shakespeare, 1604
A general, a senator's daughter, and an ensign who knows exactly which words will undo them: Shakespeare's tightest study of how love is talked out of existence.
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
A sharp-eyed comedy about money, manners and misjudgment, in which a quick-witted woman and a proud man keep being wrong about each other. Funnier and more cutting than its reputation suggests.
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Τὰ μαῦρα κούτσουρα
Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης, 1912
A romantic tale set in a Greek island community in the late 18th century, exploring love, honor, and the unexpected turns of fate.
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Ἔρως Ἥρως
Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης, 1887
A penniless fisherman sleeps in his boat beneath a lit-up wedding house, and schemes all night at a rescue that may never happen. Papadiamantis's only novel: salt, roses, and one long refusal to act.
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Ἡ Βλαχοπούλα
Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης, 1904
A returned servant girl, a father who wants to marry her off, and a young idler who sees poetry where others see a peasant. Papadiamantis at his most tender and most dangerous.
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The Fault in Our Stars
John Green, 2012
A witty, dying teenager meets a boy who refuses to be solemn, and together they argue with oblivion, love, and the author of an unfinished book.
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Persuasion
Jane Austen, 1817
A woman of twenty-seven meets again the man she was talked out of marrying, and begins to wonder whether prudence was ever a virtue.
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Twilight
Stephenie Meyer, 2005
A girl moves to a rain-drenched town and falls for a boy whose beauty is inseparable from danger. Mood, appetite, and bad decisions.
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Short Fiction
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920
Fitzgerald's short stories are where he tried everything — jazz-age comedy, a man born old, first love, a girl who bobs her hair — in twenty pages or less.
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë, 1847
An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.
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People We Meet on Vacation
Emily Henry, 2021
Two best friends who vacation together every summer have one last trip to fix what went wrong between them—and decide what they are.
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Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021
An artificial friend watches a child and the people who love her, trying to learn what makes a person singular—and whether love can be copied.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare, 1600
Four lovers, a fairy king and queen, and a troupe of terrible actors collide in one wood outside Athens, all under the same love potion.
A taste of the feed
Two men meet between the armies, and one answers a question with leaves.
«Τὴν γενεάν μου τί ἐρωτᾶς, ἀτρόμητε Τυδείδη; Καὶ τῶν θνητῶν ἡ γενεὰ τῶν φύλλων ὁμοιάζει· τῶν φύλλων ἄλλα ὁ ἄνεμος χαμαὶ σκορπᾶ καὶ ἄλλα φυτρώνουν, ὡς ἡ ἄνοιξη τὰ δένδρ’ ἀναχλωραίνει· καὶ τῶν θνητῶν μιὰ γενεὰ φυτρώνει καὶ ἄλλη παύει.
Ιλιάδα · Όμηρος
Marianne decides that a calm heart deserves no credit for staying calm.
Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne, than her own had seemed faulty to her. The business of self-command she settled very easily:—with strong affections it was impossible, with calm ones it could have no merit. That her sister’s affections were calm, she dared not deny, though she blushed to acknowledge it; and of the strength of her own, she gave a very striking proof, by still loving and respecting that sister, in spite of this mortifying conviction.
Sense and Sensibility · Jane Austen
What love costs when you stop pretending it is beautiful.
Ugly love becomes you. Consumes you. Makes you hate it all. Makes you realize that all the beautiful parts aren’t even worth it. Without the beautiful, you’ll never risk feeling the ugly. So you give it all up. You give it all up. You never want love again, no matter what kind it is, because no type of love will ever be worth living through the ugly love again.
Ugly Love · Colleen Hoover
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