| The staff writer Parul Sehgal, who reviews Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” in this week’s issue, shares some of her favorite fiction about the end of love. Unhappy couples get all the press (in part, I hazard, because ordinary happiness is so much harder to depict). And it has been the season for memoirs and novels about marriages on the rocks. Any list of my favorites in this crowded genre would have to begin with Natalia Ginzburg’s taut and creepy novella “The Dry Heart” (1947), which begins (and ends) with the heroine very calmly shooting her husband between his eyes. On the surface, Willa Cather’s “My Mortal Enemy” (1926) seems much more well-behaved, but it’s an even stranger, scarier story, featuring a woman undone not by betrayal but by getting exactly what she wanted; she is worn down, smothered, and effaced by love and devotion. Both books are quick and mean, clocking in at less than a hundred pages—the novella might be the genre for love that burns hot, burns out. But for brevity’s sake, the gold medal goes to Margaret Atwood and her six-word short story: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” | 
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