“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. Anita 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

“This 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

“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

"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

“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

“Love Songs for a Lost Continent defies expectation. You’ll think you’re being led into a narrative that’s comfortably familiar, but instead will find work that pushes boundaries, redefines freedoms both personal and artistic.”

- Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy and The Prayer Room

"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

“The thirteen sparkling pieces in Anita Felicelli’s debut collection grapple 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: A Novel

Press / Praise

• Rob Mclennan’s blog - 12 or 20 (SECOND) series

• NEW YORK TIMES - “What Constitutes a Foreigner?” by Rumaan Alam

• OTHER PPL PODCAST w/ BRAD LISTI - Episode 555 with Anita Felicelli

• INDIA CURRENTS - Review by Shikha Malaviya

• ATTICUS REVIEW - “Identities Changed and Paradise Lost,” by Alice Lu

• THE RUMPUS Mini-Interview Project #152: Anita Felicelli

• THE MILLIONS - “Anita Felicelli and Huda Al-Marashi Discuss Diaspora, Breaking the Rules, and Reality vs. Likability”

• POPMATTERS - “Short Stories: American Writers of South Asian Origin” by Jenny Bhatt

• THE AEROGRAM - Review by Aditya Desai

• LA Review of Books - Review by Ilana Masad

• KIRKUS - Review

• HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW - Review by Mahnoor Khan

• FOREWORD REVIEWS - Review by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

• THE TEAL MANGO - The Power of the Short Story, by Lakshmi Gandhi