Fools for Love

Stories

By: Helen Schulman

Narrated by: Alex McKenna, Edoardo Ballerini, Helen Laser, Candace Fitzgerald, Jane Oppenheimer, Hillary Huber, David Warshofsky

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.”

Critic reviews

“Helen Schulman is not afraid to make you squirm. Across her long and distinguished career as a novelist and short story writer, she has fearlessly explored the awkward collisions between our private and public selves, between what we present to the world and what we conceal from even our closest companions. . . . Fools for Love her latest collection of stories, finds Schulman’s characters weighing the past against the present, looking for redemption in the wrong places and occasionally coming up roses.”
—Los Angeles Times

“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 [starred review]

“Helen Schulman’s new col­lec­tion makes will­ing fools for love of us all. Her wild inner heart reach­es out to our own, and as she says, ​'who wouldn’t want a piece of that?'”
—Jewish Book Council

“Engrossing. . . . Smartly balances humor and heartache. . . . [Schulman’s] eye for detail and bold characterizations make for an entertaining affair.”
—Publishers Weekly

"Piercingly lovely. . . . A sly wit at work."
—AirMail

“Witty, polished, and deceptively casual. . . . Gives John Cheever a run for his money.”
—Booklist

“A couple of ghosts add an edginess to these stories whose spiky, sex-driven characters are all, definitely, fools for love.”
—Library Journal

“Smart and often witty. . . . The stuff of enjoyable fiction, and she delivers it with style.”
—Shelf Awareness

A so so collection

The best story was “The Shabbos Goy”. That story really moved me. The rest were forgettable.

The stories are clever, but sadly very superficial

The stories touch all the trendy hotspots in our culture, but they leave you Unsatisfied because they are so superficial