Introduction: Love and narrative form -- Maternal language and maternal history in Beloved -- Riffing on love and playing with narration in Jazz -- Displacement--political, psychic, and textual--in Paradise -- Love's time and the reader: ethical effects of nachträglichkeit (belatedness) in Love -- Failed messages, maternal loss, and narrative form in A mercy -- Severed limbs, the uncanny, and the return of the repressed in Home -- Love, trauma, and the body in God help the child -- Conclusion: Revisioning love and slavery