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.”