Fools for Love: Stories

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.”