Love at Least

Praise for Love at Least
"Motoya balances a raw, unfiltered examination of a woman pixilated by mental illness with an anti-love story that unsettles and lingers." —Booklist

Praise for The Lonesome Bodybuilder
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Finalist for the 2019 Otherwise Award
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year
An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of the Year
Named 1 of 31 New Books by People of Colour to Get Excited About This Year by Cosmopolitan (UK)

"Prize-winning Japanese author Motoya offers a collection of 11 stories that fuse the banality of the everyday with dreamlike elements of fantasy. Motoya explores marriage, gender and power through stories that begin with real life―the titular story is about a woman who decides to become a bodybuilder―and slowly turn surreal." ―Time

"In this delightful collection, realistic setups turn magical and surreal to illuminate deeper themes of marriage, gender and love." ―The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

"In this alien yet familiar world, invisible forces assume physical shapes: two lovers become identical to each other; girlfriends develop features desired by their boyfriends. The monstrous plots prompt human queries: Does getting comfortable in a relationship involve a loss of self? Is one’s identity bounded by one’s surroundings?" ―The New Yorker

"The stories are openly fantastical, inventing the sorts of feminist fairy tales that were popularized by Angela Carter and have been adapted with wit and ingenuity by writers like Han Kang and Carmen Maria Machado . . . Strange and strangely hopeful." ― The Wall Street Journal

"Ingenious, funny and frightening." ― The Guardian

"The Lonesome Bodybuilder is peak bizarre, a strange juggling act of absurdism, humor, horror and magical realism. These are stories about the strange bouts of insanity domesticity can inflict upon us and the abstract freedoms we find in breaking routine." ―San Francisco Chronicle, Recommendations from Green Apple Books on the Park

"Channeling the surrealist spirit of Banana Yoshimoto and Aimee Bender, Yukiko Motoya’s trippy debut story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Soft Skull Press), alchemizes commonplace frustrations―a malfunctioning umbrella in a downpour, a tedious meeting―into marvelous allegories . . . Weird and wonderful." ― O, The Oprah Magazine

"The 11 short stories in this collection, translated by Asa Yoneda, range in tone from ominous thrillers to lighthearted folktales . . . Motoya’s eerie touches allow the characters to embrace inconvenient and irrational parts of themselves; at moments when self-doubt is making them flounder, these otherworldly intrusions act as a corrective force." ― The Atlantic

"Offering a fascinating and insightful dimension into the intricacies of human paranoia, the 11 stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder study extremes and absurdities rooted in the mundane. A hopeful exploration of things that appear outlandish or foreign, these stories are deft, courageous, and written with intense honesty and clarity." ―PEN America