Things That Pass for Love by Allison Amend
An incisive, poignant, often hilarious look at contemporary relationships, Allison Amend's much-anticipated Things That Pass for Love eschews the familiar dating scene in favor of portrayals of fractured families, urban schools, small towns, book clubs, cults, academia, golf culture, and--yes--sex in modern life. A teacher struggles to bond with jaded students as bodies drop from the sky; a man meets his illegitimate son for an awkward pumpkin picking excursion; a professor develops a sexual obsession with the student destined to surpass him; and a female cyberotica writer looks for conventionality in the form of a suitor who may be in love with her dog. Whether writing about a small town murder, homeschooling, experiments on lab mice, or the disintegration of a long marriage over the course of a golf game, Amend's characters are more than whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny, they are chillingly real, memorable people looking for love--or what passes for it.
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Paperback: 223 pages
ISBN: 978-0-976717-74-4
Also available as an eBook
An incisive, poignant, often hilarious look at contemporary relationships, Allison Amend's much-anticipated Things That Pass for Love eschews the familiar dating scene in favor of portrayals of fractured families, urban schools, small towns, book clubs, cults, academia, golf culture, and--yes--sex in modern life. A teacher struggles to bond with jaded students as bodies drop from the sky; a man meets his illegitimate son for an awkward pumpkin picking excursion; a professor develops a sexual obsession with the student destined to surpass him; and a female cyberotica writer looks for conventionality in the form of a suitor who may be in love with her dog. Whether writing about a small town murder, homeschooling, experiments on lab mice, or the disintegration of a long marriage over the course of a golf game, Amend's characters are more than whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny, they are chillingly real, memorable people looking for love--or what passes for it.
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Paperback: 223 pages
ISBN: 978-0-976717-74-4
Also available as an eBook
An incisive, poignant, often hilarious look at contemporary relationships, Allison Amend's much-anticipated Things That Pass for Love eschews the familiar dating scene in favor of portrayals of fractured families, urban schools, small towns, book clubs, cults, academia, golf culture, and--yes--sex in modern life. A teacher struggles to bond with jaded students as bodies drop from the sky; a man meets his illegitimate son for an awkward pumpkin picking excursion; a professor develops a sexual obsession with the student destined to surpass him; and a female cyberotica writer looks for conventionality in the form of a suitor who may be in love with her dog. Whether writing about a small town murder, homeschooling, experiments on lab mice, or the disintegration of a long marriage over the course of a golf game, Amend's characters are more than whip-smart and laugh-out-loud funny, they are chillingly real, memorable people looking for love--or what passes for it.
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
Paperback: 223 pages
ISBN: 978-0-976717-74-4
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE
"The strangeness of the stories in Things That Pass For Love give them a particular kind of universality; we believe in these characters and situations even as we're made a little uncomfortable at how easily we recognize them." --Lynna Williams, Chicago Tribune
"The strangeness of the stories in Things That Pass for Love give them a particular kind of universality; we believe in these characters and situations even as we're made a little uncomfortable at how easily we recognize them." --Lynna Williams, Chicago Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allison Amend, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award-winning short story collection THINGS THAT PASS FOR LOVE and the novel STATIONS WEST, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her new novel, A NEARLY PERFECT COPY, will be published on April 9, 2013. She lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College and for the Red Earth MFA program. Visit her on the web at: http://www.allisonamend.com or http://www.facebook.com/AllisonAmendAuthor
