REDDEST ROSE ROMANTIC LOVE ANCIENT GREEKS-REALITY TV TP

The internationally acclaimed activist follows up her satirical work of graphic medicine with this collection of humorous comics essays about how historical and societal shifts have altered - and perhaps destroyed - 'romantic love.' The deceptively simple through-line for Swedish media personality and activist Liv Strömquist's The Reddest Rose is the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of twentysomething models? Her answer - in the form of this collection of well-researched, humorous comics essays - tracks how philosophers and artists, from the Ancient Greeks to Beyoncé, conceptualized romantic love. Strömquist's signature interlocutor characters, drawn in a zine-y, flat, blocky style, ask each other questions and offer sharp commentary as they guide readers throughout history and the change in societies' values, from showing love/loving to getting love/being loved. (Poet Hilda 'H.D.' Doolittle - who was so love-stricken by a man taking off his glasses that she believed they viewed dolphins together in another dimension - lends the book its title.) Lord Byron, Socrates, Byung-Chul Han, Ezra Pound, Slavoj Žižek, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ariadne, and many others make cameos. For the first time in English, in The Reddest Rose, Strömquist wonders: in a rationalist, consumerist world, can romantic love survive?