The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. When they kiss, lovers carve out a space for themselves, find their peace from war. When they kiss the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They join together in their distinct, embraced tongues. The kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. And the extinction of the kiss – or more importantly, of the desire to kiss – is the beginning of the end of love. In this short book, Massimo Recalcati – one of Italy’s leading intellectuals and bestselling authors – offers seven brief lessons on the mystery and miracle of love, from the serendipity of the first encounter to its end or its continuation over time, as mysterious and miraculous as the first encounter itself. “Both provocative and persuasive. Massimo Recalcati taps a rich seam of experience and analytic perception in this brief, elegant essay on love. The lessons he offers navigate us through love’s many turns and as many of its literary greats. All the while, he holds up a mirror to the predations of desire under capitalism, offering us instead an image of love in which the possibility of a' forever’ exists in an intimacy of strangers.” Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love “The book’s proclamations yield flashes of real wisdom” The Washington Post “[Recalcati’s] style entrances… the lyricism and spaciousness of his prose only intensify its impact. At times The Enduring Kiss reads like poetry, fluent and heedless, as if written in a sensual delirium.” The Australian Massimo Recalcati  is a psychoanalyst who teaches at the universities of Pavia and Verona.