ABOUT LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT

“This is the book we needed to read yesterday… a book we will still be reading tomorrow.”
– Porochista Khakpour, author of Sick and Sons and Other Flammable Objects

From the glittering heat of India’s Pink City to the palm-lined streets of Silicon Valley and the vanilla-bean fields of Madagascar, Anita Felicelli’s debut collection delivers a dazzling array of precisely drawn characters searching for identity in the seemingly narrow spaces of their everyday lives.

Imbued with magic, Felicelli’s stories center on first- and second-generation Tamil Americans–immigrants, daughters, and lovers exploring what it means to lose and to love, to continually reinvent oneself while honoring the personal histories and lost continents that shape us all.

PRAISE FOR LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT

“Felicelli creates a kind of conversation with the reader, allowing one to submerge into her fictional worlds and then return to the surface with new understandings about the world we live in today.”
—S. Kirk Walsh, SF Chronicle

“Love Songs for a Lost Continent is an expansive, inventive meditation on the shifting landscape of identity, on how people can be shaped and reshaped by violence and power and love…Felicelli has a singular eye for the moments that transfigure lives, and this tremendous debut collection announces the arrival of a stunning new voice.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“Anita Felicelli’s best stories are her boldest.”
—Rumaan Alam, NY Times

“At last, someone is telling our stories in a unique and interesting way.”
—Shikha Malaviya, India Currents

“Felicelli’s debut collection grapple[s] with the power of fiction itself: the mythologies handed down to us, the false promises of the American dream, and the stories we don’t recognize we’re telling ourselves.”
—Katharine Noel, author of Meantime

“Love Songs for a Lost Continent is the kind of work that we all need to be reading right now. Filled with heart and heat, these beautiful stories pursue and reinvent ideas of home and self in ways that push our national conversation on identity.”
—Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Pioneer Girl and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner

“Tigers, swans and rampion–Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent captures the senses with skillful explorations of sexual being and human vulnerability. This collection not only rallies the imagination, it challenges the intellectual self and the diverse self. A beautifully rendered collection, both enchanting and lyrical.”
—Rae Bryant, author of The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals and editor of Eckleburg

“Surprising, surreal sometimes, and strong in theme and exploration, these stories probe the limits of love, the fluidity of home, and the pressures and resistance of women in a patriarchal landscape without ever losing humor, engagement, and a quiet elegance and tenderness. They move with assurance through ideas, themes, and landscapes revealing what is new within what might have been expected. A very strong debut.”
—Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face, Cartography of the Void

“This is a wild, startling collection about loss, migration, colonization, and constantly shifting identities. What does it mean to be an outsider, and where does our power really lie? For the characters in Love Songs for a Lost Continent, living and loving in the margins is as precarious as a tightrope walk.”
—Chaitali Sen, author of The Pathless Sky

“Anita Felicelli will hook her arm into yours and run with you through an India, an America, a history and future that ring with truth and radical growth.”
—Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy

“How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were the truth,” declares “Deception,” the opening story in Anita Felicelli’s Love Songs for a Lost Continent. This logic penetrates the collection; paradigms topple and shift like dominoes as protagonists careen from displacement toward personal truth, each hoping they might find their way.”
—Foreword Starred Review

“Felicelli has that rare and wonderful quality as a writer: she doesn’t require each story to end neatly, letting the lingering frustration and injustice remain in a reader’s mind, just as they would outside the bounds of fiction…By attempting to get at the heart of painful spaces, by exploring the complex realities of her characters, and by refusing to let any of them emerge from a history-less vacuum, Felicelli seems to be asking us to pause, to consider, to try to understand those around us.”
—Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Review of Books

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anita Felicelli's short stories have appeared in The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, and Eckleburg, and have been finalists for Glimmer Train awards. She's contributed essays and reviews to the New York Times (Modern Love), Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Puffin Foundation grant for poetry and two Greater Bay Area Journalism awards. Her work appears in several anthologies and has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She holds a B.A. with honors in Rhetoric, English and Interdisciplinary Studies (visual art) from UC Berkeley and a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law. She was bitten by the travel bug, and has never recovered— she's visited all the continents except two. Born in South India, she lives in the Bay Area with her family.

Find her online at:
www.anitafelicelli.com/
@AnitaFelicelli