Fools for Love: Stories — Helen Schulman

A virtuosic, laugh-out-loud collection of stories that explore the fraught and fantastic nature of human connection -- featuring women, men, various couples, and one terribly precocious baby enmeshed in tangled romances of all shapes and sizes.

The wide-ranging and inventive stories that make up Helen Schulman's Fools for Love are funny, sexy, sometimes sad, and always surprising. A single American mother and a French Orthodox rabbi fall in love over poetry, as she helps to dismantle a shuttered bookstore in Paris. A rebellious young woman marries a series of men who are all wrong for her and proceeds to cheat on each of them; her widowed mother finds her deceased husband's sex diaries and decides she needs to make up for lost time. And in the title story, a blossoming East Village playwright realizes that her marriage to a brilliant actor is doomed, after watching his performance in an alternative production of Sam Shepard's iconic play.
            Characters wander in and out of one another's stories -- and beds -- in these hilarious tales of lust and attachment -- a rollicking feast of love and loss that is not unlike the experience of life itself. Fools for Love is a vital addition to Schulman's acclaimed body of work -- a collection that showcases at every turn what Katie Kitamura has referred to as her “sharp observation, buoyant wit, and unfailing empathy.”