Hanna Halperin is the author of two novels,
Something Wild and
I Could Live Here Forever.
Something Wild won the 2021 Edward Lewis Wallant Award and was a finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Her stories have been published in
The Kenyon Review,
n+1,
New Ohio Review, and
Joyland. She has taught fiction workshops at GrubStreet in Boston and worked as a domestic violence counselor.
At Electric Lit Halperin tagged nine novels about characters looking to be transformed by sex or love, including:
Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin
In Another Marvelous Thing, Frank and Billie fall into an affair, while they’re both married to other people. Their love story is 
chronicled through eight interlinking stories, each told through a different point of view. Even though Frank and Billie are unfaithful, their current marriages aren’t loveless. But the relationship they find with each other—Frank is much older and more traditional than Billie—is tender, undeniable, and unusual. Frank says about Billy: “She is an absolute fact of my life…I conduct a mental life with her when we are apart. Thinking about her is like entering a secret room to which only I have access.” Laurie Colwin, who died in 1992, writes beautifully about people falling in love. One thing I love about this story is how gently it ends. Not all obsession leads to a crash. Sometimes people are just finding their way.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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