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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 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."
"Without attempting to be a novel in stories, the collection is free to go off on wild tangents, such as a story narrated by an evil baby, Lucien H., and a tale of forbidden love with a married Orthodox rabbi in Paris. In multiple stories, people come back from the dead, and everywhere, there are sentences to make you laugh...Never underestimate the power of a good short story to lift your spirits." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dazzling and funny." —Publishers Weekly
"A couple of ghosts add an edginess to these stories whose spiky, sex-driven characters are all, definitely, fools for love." —Library Journal
"Witty, polished, and deceptively casual...Gives John Cheever a run for his money." —Booklist
"Smart and often witty...The stuff of enjoyable fiction, and she delivers it with style." —Shelf Awareness
This information about Fools for Love 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.
Helen Schulman is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including Come with Me and This Beautiful Life. Schulman has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sundance, Aspen Words, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.
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