Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yesher first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Wellas a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of what the Portuguese call saudademeaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irrepreably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American letters has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.