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."