Sunday is Valentine’s Day, and we’ve plenty of romantic work on the site; you could start with our February 2005 issue, “Love, Literally,” with its array of affection not only for sweethearts but also for family, country, travel, and more. But if your view of amour is less rose-colored than jaundiced, we invite you to enjoy the array of antiromance on the site. One of our favorites is Teresa Solana’s deadpan “A Stitch in Time,” in which maternal love trumps marital discord. An elderly woman lures her abusive son-in-law to her flat and, with the help of her equally superannuated friend, cuts him down to size and then repurposes the results to fertilize the garden. You could also check out Horacio Castellanos Moya’s rollicking tale of a three-way gone wrong. In “Snatch,” translated by our own Samantha Schnee, the hapless narrator talks his girlfriend into adding another woman to the equation, then finds himself subtracted. Or, if you’d like to be reminded of the futility of carrying a torch, try Mieko Kawakami’s “Where Have All the Sundays Gone,” in which a woman still brooding over her high school boyfriend tries to rekindle the spark. We wish you happy and unsentimental reading. 

Image: Okumura Masanobu, “Lovers in Edo Fighting Over a Love Letter,” from the series Love in Three Capitals, 1720s