The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Larry Smith is editor of SMITH Magazine (smithmag.net) and co-editor of Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.

"These books revive my heart every time:

If We Ever Break Up, This is My Book by Jason Logan

I kept this bizarre book of hand-scrawled doodles, pie charts, Venn diagrams, and lists in my bathroom for years. At least, I figured, the folks who had to pee in my apartment would know about Jason Logan’s genius little book about love and how it messes with all our heads. To be sure, the author’s brain does not work like all the others. But his outward expressions of his internal musings about his relationship ought to be somebody’s Bible; on some days it’s mine.

Here is New York by E.B. White

Once a year I check in with E.B. White’s well known, much loved, 56-page love letter to New York, a girl I’ve been crushing on my whole life; and one who can bring you back from your lowest depths just by stepping outside to see her.

Mortified: Love is a Battlefield by David Nadelberg

From the Mortified web and print project, a collection of old diaries and love letters, with reflection by the writers’ "adult self." We’ve all been there, and watching others go back there is an instant de-funkifier.

Twenty Love Poems And A Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

There. I said it. Pablo Neruda. The most obvious person possible to include on a love list. And at the risk of obviousness to a crowd in the world’s top 1 percent of lit-i-ness, I’ll just say this: Each time I look across the room and see that my wife keeps the book I sent her during a time when we were separated (unwillingly) for 13 months by her side of the bed (or maybe she’s moved it next to the computer for a few days), it makes my heart grow a little bigger."

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The Book Doctors Are In

To Read In Case Of: Heartbreak

We’re asking our favorite authors and readers to make recommendations for those moments when a good book is the only cure. For the month of Valentine’s Day, we’re asking: what’s the best book (or books) to read in times of heartbreak?

Daniel Bergner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two books of nonfiction:In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Bergner’s writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.His most recent book is The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco), which he reads at McNally Jackson on February 2.

"Literary antidotes for heartbreak? The Catastrophist by Irish novelist Ronan Benett — it never got much attention on this side of the Atlantic, but it’s a story of tortured love set in the Congo that is impossible to put down.

"And then there’s Greene’s The Quiet American – how to have your rival rubbed out and reclaim your lost lover.

"And Wharton’s Ethan Frome – a gorgeous little book that we all read in high school when we’re too young to recognize how perfectly it’s made…

"As the author of The Other Side of Desire, I should probably be recommending something kinky, but I can think only of books that are beautiful and sad."