The Women I Love

A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity.

Marcello, an editor and a poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he's writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains.

So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write about the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protégé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; Irene, his estranged gay sister; and his elegant mother.

Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico's The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women--illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.


About the Author

Francesco Pacifico lives in Rome. He is the author of the novels The Story of My Purity and Class, a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2017. He is a frequent contributor to La Repubblica and n+1, and his work has also appeared in McSweeney's, The White Review, and elsewhere. He is a founder and senior editor of the literary magazine Il Tascabile. He has translated the work of a number of writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Miller, Dave Eggers, Hanya Yanagihara, Ralph Ellison, Chris Ware, Matt Groening, David Mazzucchelli, and Alison Bechdel.

Elizabeth Harris has translated works by Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, Antonio Tabucchi, Andrea Bajani, and Claudia Durastanti. For her various translations of Tabucchi, she has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award for prose.