About Love, in Theory
• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (September 15, 2012)
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
In this funny, brainy, and thoroughly engaging debut collection, an award-winning writer considers contemporary romance through the lens of scholarly theories to illuminate love in the Information Age.
In ten captivating and tender stories, E.J. Levy takes readers through the surprisingly erotic terrain of the intellect, offering a smart and modern take on the age-old theme of love—whether between a man and woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, or a mother and a child—drawing readers into tales of passion, adultery, and heartbreak. A disheartened English professor’s life changes when she goes rock climbing and falls for an outdoorsman. A gay oncologist attending his sister’s second wedding ponders dark matter in the universe and the ties that bind us. Three psychiatric patients, each convinced that he is Christ, give rise to a love affair in a small Minnesota town. A Brooklyn woman is thrown out of an ashram for choosing earthly love over enlightenment. A lesbian student of film learns theories of dramatic action the hard way—by falling for a married male professor. Incorporating theories from physics to film to philosophy, from Rational Choice to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, these stories movingly explore the heart and mind—shooting cupid’s arrow towards a target that may never be reached.
“There is nothing theoretical about my love for Love, in Theory, a brilliant debut collection by E. J. Levy. Sad, funny, and always wise, Levy’s stories reveal truths about how we love and lose, trust and betray, with an intelligence that takes my breath away. I’ll be returning to these wonderful stories again and again.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“E. J. Levy’s stories brilliantly and winningly reveal the human heart as it strives to measure its own beating through love. Love, in Theory is a collection richly worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s name.”–Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer-prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“This debut collection…is wholly beguiling and authoritative, an instruction from first page to last. E. J. Levy has a noticing eye, an epigrammatic way of describing the world, and what she looks at is both freshly seen and shown. Love, in Theory is a practical manual for beginners at and adepts of love, for young and old, for the unrequited and faithful and faithless—which is to say, for us all.” —Nicholas Delbanco, author of Lastingness: The Art of Old Age
“Selfishness has never been sent up as mordantly as it is in E.J. Levy’s debut collection of stories.” —Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance and Grief
About E. J. Levy
E. J. Levy is an award-winning writer. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, and Paris Review, among other places, and have earned a Pushcart Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and twice been named among the year’s 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories, among other honors. She is editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Avon), which won the Lambda Literary Award. This is her fiction debut.
To learn more, visit ejlevy.com.
E. J.’s Tour Stops
Monday, September 17th: Unabridged Chick
Tuesday, September 18th: Paperspines
Wednesday, September 19th: What She Read …
Thursday, September 20th: A Reader of Fictions
Wednesday, September 26th: Kind of a Mess
Thursday, September 27th: Picky Girl
Monday, October 1st: missris
Wednesday, October 3rd: The Betty and Boo Chronicles
Thursday, October 4th: Life in Review
Monday, October 8th: Sweet Southern Home
Tuesday, October 9th: Bonjour, Cass!
Friday, October 12th: Book Reviews by Molly
Monday, October 15th: In the Next Room
Tuesday, October 16th: Conceptual Reception
Thursday, October 18th: The Mookse and the Gripes
Tuesday, October 23rd: Dreaming in Books
Friday, October 26th: Tiffany’s Bookshelf
Maureen Stanton says
I love this bok–made me laugh and cry. Brilliant writing. Not many books have everything–great writing, smart and witty, and the ability to move the reader.