REDDEST ROSE ROMANTIC LOVE HC

The deceptively simple through-line for Swedish media personality and activist Liv Stromquist's The Reddest Rose is the question: Why does Leonardo DiCaprio date an endless string of 20-something 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 Beyonce, conceptualised romantic love. Stromquist'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 Zizek, Lou Andreas-Salome, Ariadne, and many others make cameos. For the first time in En