Romances with Topping & Co.

Jen recommends How We Named the Stars by Andres N. Odorica

"A beautiful and tender debut, How We Named the Stars follows Daniel and Sam as they meet at university and navigate love, identity, and self-discovery. From the halls of their East Coast campus to Daniel’s ancestral journey to Mexico, their love is tested and shaped by distance, growth, and their pasts. With Odorica’s lyrical prose and deeply drawn characters, this expansive but intimate novel captures the intensity of first love with all of its joys and heartbreaks. This is one of the most genuine and authentic depictions of falling for someone I’ve read in a long time. If you’re looking for a story to get completely wrapped up in, then look no further: love, loss, self-discovery, flatcest… this book has it all!"

Mía recommends If Not, Winter by Anne Carson

This Valentine’s Day, delve into in the timeless echoes of love and desire with If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s enchanting translation of Sappho’s poetry. Alongside the only complete surviving poem, Carson presents Sappho’s other fragments with elegant precision, preserving word order and embracing white space, allowing us to reimagine the missing lines and more intricately understand the depth of her longing. The result is a minimalist yet deeply moving rendition that allows readers to feel the weight of absence and desire.

Sappho’s words—“Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”—remind us of love’s enduring power, still resonant two and a half millennia after her death. Carson’s notes on her translation are illuminating and accessible, making this a perfect read for both poetry lovers and newcomers. And what better way to celebrate than to immerse into a poetic mythology of the goddess of love herself: Aphrodite.

Maria Recommends Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

There is something so beautiful about lying in bed on Valentine’s Day, with your head on a loved one’s shoulder, reading about how ridiculous love can be. Although, I’m not talking about the smitten, head-over-heels kind of ridiculous. To read the seven short stories in Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera is to follow deeply flawed characters in their hypocrisies and paradoxes. It is to explore the deception and vulgarity in some loves. What is unbelievable though, is that, when finishing each of these often profoundly unsettling stories, your lips still cannot help but curl into a smile.