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Book Summary and Reviews of Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Fiction

by Amy Bloom

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • Jan 2010, 224 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through this collection by Amy Bloom, the New York Times bestselling author of Away. Bloom's astonishing and astute new work of interconnected stories illuminates the mysteries of passion, family, and friendship.

Propelled by Bloom's dazzling prose, unmistakable voice, and generous wit, Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of real people's lives, exploring the changes that love and loss create. A young woman is haunted by her roommate's murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places. In one quartet of interlocking stories, two middle-aged friends, married to others, find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all while never underestimating the cost. In another linked set of stories, we follow mother and son for thirty years as their small and uncertain family becomes an irresistible tribe.

Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreaking, these stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, capture deep human truths. As The New Yorker has said, "Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. The four stand-alone stories, while nice, have a hard time measuring up against the more immersive interlinked material, which, really, is quite sublime." - Publishers Weekly

"Bloom’s stories are emotionally precise, mordantly funny, and beautifully distilled." - Booklist

"An eminently readable new collection." - Library Journal

This information about Where the God of Love Hangs Out was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Janine

Not as bad as people say..
I've just finished this book for my senior seminar class at a private college and, let me tell you, if it were 'sex scene after sex scene' I don't think we would be reading it.
The novel is broken into sections and each section sheds new light on the characters involved, their struggles, anxieties, and strife. I personally feel that this book, though I would never have bought it if I hadn't needed it for class, was a great read. The first section was a little slow paced, but the novel really picks up after that.
Bloom is really a brilliant author and really has a way with character creation.
Give it a chance. You won't be disappointed.

KPEIC

Disgusting
The first pages of this book are sex scene after sex story after sex scene. If you enjoy shallow, erotic literature, this is the book for you. But I hope you are not that kind of reader...

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Author Information

Amy Bloom Author Biography

Photo: © Elena Seibert

Amy Bloom is the author of four novels: White Houses, Lucky Us, Away, and Love Invents Us; and three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Elle, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon, and her work has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the Director of the Shapiro Center at ...

... Full Biography
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Other books by Amy Bloom at BookBrowse
  • White Houses jacket
  • In Love jacket

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Read-Alikes

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