Valentine’s Day can be both a beautiful and fraught time, with the pressures and expectations of grand passions and even grander gestures of roses, chocolate, and declarations of undying ardor. But this Valentine’s Day, the University of Chicago Press would like to share a baker’s dozen of recent and forthcoming books that remind us: Love comes in many forms. Some of these thirteen titles revel in romantic love, yes, but most explore platonic and other forms of deep connection. Read on for celebrations of sisterhood; of friendship; of the relationships we have with beloved pets; of queer love, family, and identity; of the pursuit of emotional, intellectual, and artistic self-knowledge—and more. They’re our gift to you, with love. XOXO

All of these Valentine’s Day books are available from our website. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order directly from us.

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From Chicago

On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays

Emily Ogden

“Ogden’s brief, buoyant, informative, and irresistible essays on motherhood, herding, hope, riffing, listening, and one-night stands enter their subjects through style pass-throughs: small, sturdy, and precisely angled. Ogden doesn’t fix thought to a map of itself, she invites it into an ever less-fettered conversation with her own life and the lives and words of others.”―Ploughshares

Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse

Anahid Nersessian

“Keats’s Odes is brash, skeptical, and tender by turns, offering a fluctuating re-visioning of Keats which is firm in its convictions. . . . Nersessian’s prose is bold, irreverent, declarative, and feral. Hyperbole and slackness are deceptive: every phrase feels carefully pitched.”―Times Literary Supplement

Who’s a Good Dog? And How to Be a Better Human

Jessica Pierce

“Bioethicist and author Pierce has penned a wonderful guide to living life with dogs and improving your bond through respectful and joyful canine-human relationships. Who’s a Good Dog? examines how we can nurture kindness, attentiveness, and empathy when working, living, and training with our dogs.”―Modern Dog

A Little Queer Natural History

Josh L. Davis

“I want to give this book to any queer or trans person who has ever felt alone, who has ever felt like they don’t belong. If you’ve ever felt like your body, your desires, your ways of loving, your family, or your gender isn’t ‘natural,’ this book is for you. Nature is beautiful, creative, mysterious, strange (complimentary), and overwhelmingly queer, and you are a part of nature.”―Book Riot

Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France

Tamara Chaplin

“Becoming Lesbian is the fruit of fifteen years of research on the subject. For the first time, this work shows how lesbian cultures, which emerged with the French cabarets of the 1920s, continued to flourish after the Second World War, subsequently enabling the politicization of lesbian identity.”―Le Monde

Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships

Abigail Ocobock

“Marriage Material compellingly shows how the expansion of marital rights shapes and strengthens same-sex relationships and marriage as an institution. Ocobock’s sensitive and incisive analysis of the normative, regulative, and cultural elements of marriage—especially as they are experienced by same-sex couples—offers a much-needed corrective to both academic and public assumptions regarding the contemporary state of marriage.”—Brian Powell, Indiana University

Love in Time: An Ethical Inquiry

Fannie Bialek

“Time places us inescapably within beginnings and endings. Love, once it begins, wants not to end. Yet somewhere between loving and losing, there is lingering. In a series of artful essays, Bialek invites us to linger with our loves, offering life lessons through the close contemplation of desire. Love in Time restores lyricism to moral inquiry and eloquence to ethics. It demonstrates that we may speak wisely and poetically, even about uncertainty. The results are luminous.”—Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

From Bodleian Library Publishing

Great Literary Friendships

Janet Phillips

“‘The power of human friendship provides a wonderful escape from the sometimes grim realities of everyday life,’ writes Phillips, editor at Bodleian Library Publishing, in her lighthearted debut, a survey of twenty-four friendships from classic works of literature. . . . A fun spin on literary analysis.”―Publishers Weekly

Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them

Susannah Fullerton

“Twain liked cats, too, as we learn in Fullerton’s charming Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them. . . . I mean it as the highest praise when I say that no guest bedroom or downstairs loo would fail to benefit from this Jellicle Ball of literary cats.”―Literary Review

Great Literary Sisters

Janet Phillips

Including writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a celebration of sisterhood throughout some of literature’s best-loved tales, from Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice to Hasina and Nazneen in Brick Lane and Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in Little Women.

Pets and Their People

Charles Foster

“In this short historico-philosophical book on our long relationship with companion animals, Foster essays easily, informatively, through Islamic attitudes, Jung, ancient Egyptian worship of felines, medieval falconry and the physical defects of brachycephalic dogs. He is utterly unmawkish, although the passing pages may provoke feelings about the animals we have known. . . . We love our pets, and that is good, as is Foster’s book.”― Country Life

From Calon at University of Wales Press

A Map of Love: Twelve Welsh Poems of Romance, Desire and Devotion

M. Wynn Thomas

This short but powerful collection features twelve pieces dating from the fourteenth century to the present, deliberately rejecting clichéd verses with its poems of regret and of mourning, straight love and gay love, bawdy verses of passion and desire, and gentle meditations on motherhood and marriage. With original illustrations by Ruth Jên Evans throughout, A Map of Love celebrates anonymous and lesser-known writers as well as household names such as Gillian Clarke and R. S. Thomas, and it includes a previously unpublished poem by Emyr Humphreys.

From Reaktion Books

Ch’ing, a Chinese Book of Love: From Early Times to the Modern Age

Edited by John Minford

“The underbelly of Chinese culture was never as poetic and as vivid as in this book on the ars amatoria―arts of love. Erotic and soulful, it takes you into the world of pillow and mat, moon and wind, rain and clouds, scented mountains and gyrating snow. These metaphors for intimacy part the curtains of the bedchamber and enrich the lexicon of love beyond the salaciousness of Western pornography. Minford, a brilliant sinologist and translator, has brought together ancient, traditional, and modern texts, with a flair for winged pleasures such as this one line from the oldest ‘Book of Songs’: I bring my lithe lass joy.”—Vera Schwarcz, Wesleyan University