Our Favorite Writers Recount the Most Romantic Things They’ve Ever Read
Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
When I first read Anna Karenina I thought the doomed, soap-opera passion between Anna and her lover, Vronksky, was the most romantic thing I’d read. Dumb college-kid. Because its’ the book’s other love that is remarkable, the slow-burn love, the eat-your-vegetables love between Levin and Kitty. It’s not as sexy to find someone who can live with forever, as a partner. But that’s what Tolstoy shows there, and it’s the best — most realistically enviable — marriage I’ve ever come across, in real-life or fiction.