Fools for Love
Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schulman (Lucky Dogs) offers a funny and mostly engrossing collection of stories published over the past three decades and bookended by a pair about a playwright named Anna. The title entry portrays Anna in 1980s New York City, when she is 22 and married to an actor who will eventually die of AIDS. In the closer, "In a Better Place," set decades later, Anna is remarried and the mother of an adult daughter. On a visit to France, she spies her long-dead father, now alive and eating oysters. France also plays host to "The Shabbos Goy," which sees a nonreligious Brooklynite in Paris becoming involved in the local Jewish community, helping with the turning-off of light switches and other tasks during the Sabbath. Two tales, "P.S.," about a college admissions coordinator who believes an applicant is the reincarnation of her dead former boyfriend, and "The Revisionist," a story whose plot is indebted to John Cheever's "The Swimmer," were expanded earlier by Schulman into novels. Though a couple entries rely on obvious punch lines, Schulman smartly balances humor and heartache throughout. The author's smart eye for detail and bold characterizations make for an entertaining affair.
