Love Songs for a Lost Continent

by Anita Felicelli

Winner of the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. 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 an array of precisely drawn characters searching for identity in the seemingly narrow spaces of their everyday lives.

Thirteen dazzling stories: A young South Indian woman is convicted of killing her tiger husband with. A young man pursues his crush on an elephant polo player. A woman runs away with her wealthy boyfriend to a vanilla farm in Madagascar. An ennui-ridden hitchhiker joins forces with a con artist.

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, India

263 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2018

About the author

Anita Felicelli is the author of HOW WE KNOW OUR TIME TRAVELERS, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Awards and the 2024 Foreword Indies Award. Her other books are CHIMERICA: A NOVEL and LOVE SONGS FOR A LOST CONTINENT, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award.

Anita is the books editor at Alta Journal and a former National Book Critics Circle board member. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times (Modern Love). She lives in the Bay Area with her family.

Reviews

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

My biased opinion is that this is the most unique, variegated, socio-culturally nuanced story collection to arrive since Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes. The titular lost continent refers to a mythical land, but also to the subcontinent of the author's birth (India). This is the fiction of exile, deracination, anomie—what Robert Lowell might refer to as "lost connections." Each story is substantively different from the next, but the love-song tone/tune (for what's "lost" remember) abides throughout the collection.

All the tales revolve around the title story, which moves like an oboe concerto toward a sad crescendo at the shore of oblivion, where the reader is left wondering, aching, re-imagining.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anita Felicelli's collection of short fiction is both a page turner and a thought provoker. Because by definition a short-story author has a limited amount of time to grab the reader, it's always a joy when a story grips you in the first paragraph, as almost all of these do.

One of my favorites was "Swans and Other Lies," about mutual deception. One of the most devastating was "The Art of Losing" about an older couple and their adult son (I'll say no more to avoid spoilers). Both of these revisited characters who appear in earlier stories, a technique I particularly like. I also really enjoyed the last, and shortest story, "The Lookout."

Many of the stories are about cultural identity and the peculiar dance around American norms that immigrants and the children of immigrants learn to do, and the intergenerational conflicts that arise from that dance.

As a short story writer myself, I plan to keep this gem of a book nearby to reread as inspiration!

[Huda Al-Marashi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anita Felicelli's Love Songs for a Lost Continent is a beautifully written, nuanced meditation on hybrid-identities, belonging, post-colonial attitudes, love and relationships. Her stories focus mostly on very specific Tamil and Tamil-American characters, shattering the illusion that India or Indian Americans are a monolith. Her characters are all complex and layered, and it's the kind of book you want to read in a book group or even a classroom because there is so much in each story to unpack. I found myself getting lost in her gorgeous prose. You can tell each story has been crafted over years and with such care and attention. A great read!

[Raj Saraiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is truly one of the best, most compelling collection of short stories I think I’ll ever read. Felicelli does an incredible job articulating the nuance and complexities of forming an identity— especially for 2nd gen immigrants. Must read for any South Asian 2nd gen immigrant in my opinion.

Favorite stories were: love songs for a lost continent, Hema and Kathy, snow, once upon a great red island.

Only slight critique I have is some of the attitudes towards the parents (usually 1st gen) may have been just a bit overdone.

[Sarah Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in Love Songs for a Lost Continent are wild, rich, and unexpected. Anita Felicelli writes with marvelous dark humor and nuance about families, countries, castes, multiple identities, romantic relationships, complicities. A Brahmin girl married to an abusive Bengal tiger becomes a suspect in his death; the son of Tamil ex-pats returns to Chennai to study folklore and falls disastrously in love; a young woman betrays a friend to try to keep her from marrying the wrong man; a recent college graduate devoted to order begins an affair with someone who introduces her to the charms of conning strangers. Although Felicelli’s voice and way of seeing the world are unique, her ability to take a story on startling turns, to bring together emotional resonances and the fantastic, makes me think of Helen Oyeyemi. But, at the same time, there are no real comparisons. This book is truly original.

I'm struck by how wonderfully believable and complicated the characters are, the pleasures of watching complicity and betrayal, love and discovery. As some of the characters appear in multiple stories, we see them from new angles, so that reading the whole book means all kinds of small and large discoveries and reversals. The subtleties of who has power and how they use it – all the different ways that caste and class and hierarchies of all kinds play out.

The stories slide back and forth from magic realism to the bite of reality and then to myths or fairytales transfigured into something very like real life. And they’re full of great places and details: a labyrinth of oily dark kelp, air that smells like plastic burning when the neighbors are smoking crack, a mother’s inability to explain to her child why we can’t hit the people we don’t like, a vividly awful lie detector, forests and cities, vanilla fields and stone towers. Whether they’re in a village in India, on vacation in Andalusia, or just trying to survive in New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, trouble finds these characters, but they can’t stop each other and can’t be stopped, no matter how fierce the forces against them. This book knocks me out. For a long time to come I'll be returning to its characters, images, and insights, getting to know it more deeply.

[Devi Laskar · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a terrific short story collection! it reminded me of Olive Kitteridge. I was very taken by the gorgeous language and the reappearance of characters in several different stories -- I highly recommend this book!

[Ann Gelder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and varied collection. These stories subtly explore identity, love, and family in ways that will haunt you long after you finish. A book to ponder and savor.

[Ina Roy-Faderman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first short story collection I've read in quite some time that does not resort to extremes or exaggerations to describe the experiences of people who aren't part of the "John Cheever world" (you know, angst in the white suburbs). Far too many recent works of fiction either sugar-coat the experiences of women, immigrants, LGBTQ& persons, and other marginalized groups (particularly from the US viewpoint) or exoticize such people in hopes of raising artificial sympathies.

Felicelli is deft in making her characters real and whole. A character is never "the gay Indian guy" or "the single mom." They're as vivid and individual as the people you love, or meet for coffee, or chat with in the grocery line. Because they're never romanticised, the reader can always *be with them* as they experience whatever difficulties and problems they face -- they're not presented from a distance. You care about them because you truly know them. That's a lot to do in a short-story format, and Felicelli does it again and again.

Interestingly, she manages the same perspective in the stories -- of which there are several -- which have what might be called a "magical realism" element. If you're looking for a chance to start reading magical realism, this collection would be great -- you won't even notice it happening and then suddenly you start seeing the world through both its real and somewhat-angled-from-real versions. It's an eye opening experience.

All the stories are good, though I have a couple of pieces I'd read first if you don't like to read stories in order -- Rampion, The Logic of Someday, Deception, The Lookout. Though now that I say this, I'm not sure I wouldn't list different ones tomorrow. They're all great -- seriously, grab this book and immerse yourself.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a huge variety of everything in these short stories: characters, plots, settings, endings, etc. Some are entirely new and surprising, some include readily accepted fantastical elements, some are unique tweaks on old narratives. Yet somehow they all manage to talk about love and loss in vastly different situations and ways. As is often the case for me with short stories, there were many which I wanted to continue on, either to learn more about the characters and where things would take them next or because it felt like an abrupt end, but it was a collection as a whole that I didn't want to put down. Every story was a new adventure (until some looped back on themselves!), and all had something or someone to reach out and hook the reader into investment. I'm not sure I would reread the book, but I'd definitely read additional ones by the author.

[Csimplot Simplot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book!!

[Lara]

DNF