Trysting

Every love story is unique. The reasons why people meet, why they have so much chemistry together, and why they sometimes fail to remain in love are different for every couple. And yet it is also true that all relationships have certain similarities. InTrysting, Emmanuelle Pagano celebrates both the original and the generic, giving us glimpses into nearly 300 different relationships of all kinds: romances between various ages, genders, and sexualities, comprising first dates, bitter memories, love at first sight, infidelities, dependencies, missed connections, divorces, and the first throes of passion. Almost anything can be a vehicle for Pagano’s imagination, from amnesia and sex to throat-clearing, sign language, earplugs, anti-depressants, arthritis, leather and PVC, comas, paint, hotels, floorboards, and showers. This potent mixture of aphorisms, anecdotes, and compact stories inspires us to know our own romances betterby catching glimpses of them in Pagano’s innumerable true-to-life fragments.

Emmanuelle Pagano is the recipient of numerous awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature for her novelLes Adolescents troglodytes. The author of seven works of literature with the prestigious French publisher P.O.L, she lives in Ardeche, France.Jennifer Higgins is a freelance translator and editor based in Oxford, U.K.Sophie Lewis’s translations include The Earth Turned Upside Down by Jules Verne,The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Ayme, and Therese and Isabelle by Violette Leduc. An editor at large for And Other Stories Publishing, she lives in London.