To Love Like Venus was kickstarted as a “Project We Love” designation by Kickstarter staff, and listed on Kickstarter’s Bookshop page as a “brilliant book brought to life on Kickstarter”. We are happy to be in such curated company!
Author Archive
Author Ivelisse Rodriguez on To Love Like Venus:
“A radical, sex-positive exploration of the necessity for love with sex. Even in the future, this is the ongoing, pivotal question we must answer for ourselves. To Love Like Venus though, shows us that that question can also obfuscate all the ways we really love.”
— Ivelisse Rodriguez, author of Love War Stories
I was introduced to Dr. Rodriguez’s work at a lovely garden book launch event in uptown Manhattan. I remember the event fondly: the lovely neighborhood people, the friendly publisher, her smile, and to the day–the best book swag I’ve ever received. It was a pen with a heart on top and it was so specific to her book. Wait, I get to read about Puerto Rican girls in love??? Wait, someone understands that love pairs with war??
“Love War Stories
Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love…
Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES Award
Best Book/Most Anticipated Book/Recommended Read of 2018: Cosmopolitan.com, The Root, Electric Literature, Bustle, Book Riot, PEN America, PopSugar, The Rumpus, B*tch, Remezcla, mitu, and others.”
Do check out her website
https://ivelisserodriguezauthor.com/
to order her book. I’ll also have a fun raffle at a book launch event for To Love Like Venus with her book (minus the pen).
TLLV cover by Baris Sehri
Asking whether engaging with a digital simulation of a human via a 2D photograph, a hologram, or a personality app decked in the clothing (or no clothing) of your choice, constitutes a healthy reality can be tricky. The answer bends towards no when it removes you from the biological and perhaps spiritual reality of what it means to be human. It separates you from real human contact. It affects women adversely with objectification and a set up for potential violence when men live in these silos and real human women don’t perform to their expectations, aka demands.
Are simulation tools such as pornography, digital boyfriend/girlfriend apps, escort services that provide company or eye-candy… are these simply benign coping tools for a lonely world? Something that should just be viewed as commodified accessories? Extensions of the layers of human sexuality that should be explored without puritan judgement?
The question becomes even more layered when you question the very nature of reality itself, are we a hologram judging the actions of a hologram.
When do boundaries protect us and when do they hurt us?
Consent is key here when it comes to partnerships. How such tastes drip into real human relationships is something to explore, which To Love Like Venus does, in a near-future world where digital love lust is for sale, or is simply life.
Our Venusian gaze now on NYC in the near-future and the impact of climate change: welcome to the new norm of superstorms. The New York Times has this video outlining the areas of the city subject to future flooding, that any present-day New Yorker can tell you is already felt.
However, if you’d like a humorous summary of that article to get to the bottom line quick, Fly Kaison has this video up on Instagram.
Looking into the near-future, as To Love Like Venus does in its time-setting in both NYC and Greece, means coming face to face with projected impacts of climate change, as we understand it. One aspect witnessed in the book is that many trees have become a once-upon-a-time in itself, along with species. We are an ecosystem, after all.
Greece:
This article in the Guardian “The age of extinction : They survived wildfires. But something else is killing Greece’s iconic fir forests” by Tam Patachako. Photographs by Ugo Mellone
documents the warning signs of a future writing itself in such a way.
The role of mother and mothers-in-law in the family unit can run starkly different courses across generations and culture. The mother-son one in particular if you add an introduced daughter-in-law. To Love Like Venus explores these experiences as part of the course of love.
The Greek Podysseyy with Christine Stavropoulos and Nikos Sousamidis —
a new “podcast that connects Hellenes of the diaspora from every corner of the globe” talk candidly about how this plays out in Greek culture and their own lives in both roles, but also how this theme is similar to regions around Greece.
Episode 11 is a fun talk that includes honest self-reflection and being supportive (even if it means fighting down reflex, and laughing at each other when we don’t.) It includes the layers of diasporic living and cross-culturalism with Hellenic pride.
http://www.youtube.com/@TheGreekPodyssey
Episode 11
https://youtu.be/RUl22KAWqFU?si=CFT1oHpHiVe8TtBy
What an honor to share that our March 2026 publication, To Love Like Venus, received a coveted review.
Read the review full review here.
Today’s the anniversary of the publication date of Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back. Happy Anniversary to us!
Swipe through to see what we accomplished this year and the human artists and professors behind this really special book that is:
-a short story collection of prose
-an anthology of comics
-an artbook with original canvas work and photogpraphy
We collected a glowing review from Kirkus, blurbs from stellar authors… It’s the book that is because it can be, and you can get it in print and ebook format.
Anniversary Special: Free shipping this week with PROMO: HAPPY
If you are trying to figure out end of year giving or meaningful gifts, this is a very good option.
Human made, all heart.
Microplastics is the public health issue behind To Love Like Venus. Here is a recent breakdown, where we are finding it in the human body, and what it might be doing to us.
https://youtu.be/v2w3zWzADgo?si=Y0FTCMdxHCKvHtCu
When not in NYC, the book highlights its effect in Greece specifically, because our gaze is often there as pleasure, vacation, beauty. Here is how it’s being found there, in its idyllic seas. Reported by Reuters by Stelios Misinas.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/mussels-reveal-growing-microplastic-pollution-greeces-prized-seas-2025-11-03/
To Love Like Venus Launched on Kickstarter today. Press release, updated 11-2025.