Books like Desire by Alma Villanueva

Henry Miller’s debut novel follows a lyrical, autobiographical monologue in which he recounts his early 1930s Parisian life, exploring sex, human behavior and bohemian culture with frankness and poetic intensity.

A collection of essays and bilingual poetry by Gloria Anzaldúa that explores Chicana, lesbian, and border identities, redefining the border as a complex psychic, social, and cultural terrain.

154 pages : 21 cm

A British couple vacationing in Italy becomes entangled with another couple, leading to a psychological exploration of love, violence, and dread.

Cynthia Cruz’s *Ruin* is a collection of poems that weave secular prayers with raw memories of a childhood marked by abuse and the loss of a brother, presenting a quietly menacing narrative of healing and loss.

A Greek immigrant's journey from humble beginnings to wealth, and the complex challenges his family faces—divorce, addiction, sexuality, and intergenerational conflict—unfold in a multigenerational saga set in America.

Cynthia Cruz’s second collection, The Glimmering Room, beckons readers down into the young speakers’ dark underworld, and because we are seduced by Cruz’s startling imagery and language rich with “Death’s outrageous music,” we follow willingly. The poems wander in and out of their own American wastelands—strip malls, bus stations, state psychiatric hospitals, “the Starver’s Ward // With the other almost-girls”—with a loneliness “so brutal / It is beautiful.” Peopled with “ambassadors from the Netherworld”—the orphaned and abused, the lost and addicted—Cruz leads us through this “traveling minstrel show / Called girlhood—” which is at once tragic and magical. From “Strange Gospels” to stark, entrancing dispatches from inside the hospital walls, these poems give voice to the voiceless in the face of poverty, addiction, war, and consumerism. “I am diseased with this / Recurring dream that is / My life,” one speaker declares, and we are devastated not by a godless world, but by a world rife with the “God of gas station bathrooms / And of girls held hostage / Inside their own bedrooms,” a God who “does not keep/ The demons back.” Relentless in its descent into “the mind’s outrageous factory,” the book’s redemption lies not in pulling us back from the edge, but in its refusal to look away or to let us forget: “memory// That warm slop of honey, / seeping. No way to stop it / And its gorgeous hurricane of bees.” from Four Way Books

Ada Limón's "Lucky Wreck" is a vibrant collection of contemporary poems that weave personal experience, emotional honesty, and cultural reflection into vivid, rhythmic verses.

Ada Limón’s *Sharks in the Rivers* weaves a contemplative look at identity, family, and loss, drawing on her California upbringing, Mexican roots, and experiences in New York to explore how we remain connected to a constantly shifting world.

An anthology of poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical pieces by Gloria Anzaldúa, offering fresh insights into her life, work, and groundbreaking theories on Chicana, lesbian, and multicultural feminism.

Erotic short stories exploring female sexuality in a world dominated by love, featuring Hungarian adventurer seducing wealthy women, veiled woman selecting strangers, and Parisian hatmaker Mathilde leaving her husband for opium dens.

The novelist Maurice Bendrix's love affair with his friend's wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. But, out of the blue she ended the relationship. Years later he sends a private detective to follow Sarah and find out the truth.

Matt Deverall, a soon-to-be plantation owner, falls in love with a mysterious woman aboard his voyage from England to Virginia, setting in motion a passionate yet turbulent destiny amid the turmoil of early America.