The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) (Vintage Contemporaries)

FROM ANNE CARSON, WINNER OF THE 2026 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

This “exquisite meditation on love and loss” (Elle) grapples with Keats’s idea that beauty is truth while telling the story of a marriage in twenty-nine “tangos”—which, like a marriage, must be danced to the end.

“[An] eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage . . . [Carson’s] verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light.”—The New York Times

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice—twenty-nine “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through tender, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only Nobel Prize–winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects—love—and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.