This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.
This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. contains thirteen stories, full-length and flash, that explore love—sexual, platonic, filial, and beyond—in its gritty and beguiling forms. A small-town teenager pursues an eccentric pinball wizard after her grandfather’s move to her home shakes up her parents’ marriage; a chronic depressive turns to a TV animal psychic in hopes of mending her relationship with her dog-loving dad; a middle-aged recovering alcoholic goes back to college and becomes fixated on his stern professor. Throughout the collection, as characters in various stages of life try to navigate love, they court obsession, madness, and transcendence.
ISBN: 978-1-070561-51-6
172pg
Published June 10, 2019
- Named Best New Short Story Collection by Westword
- Bronze Winner in the 2019 Foreword INDIES
- Finalist for the 2020 High Plains Book Awards
- Finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Awards
"I love Jenny Wortman’s stories! They are strange, sad, and funny. More important, Wortman is a writer wise to the perils of our fragile minds, which can be brought low by demons of mental health. Mercy and imagination are our only hope. These stories have them in spades."
— Steve Almond, author of Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country
"Jennifer Wortman’s diverse stories are absolutely electric. They explore self-consciousness with unfailing wit and candor, while revealing our most hidden hurts and desires. In substance and style, they’re a literary funhouse. What an intimate, wise, nervy, and soaring collection from a remarkable writer."
—Steven Schwartz, author of Madagascar: New and Selected Stories
"I love this book! Jennifer Wortman's stories cover narrative territory such as depression, isolation, sexual relationships, and family dysfunction, pairing pain with the humor and joy of Wortman's fresh and inimitable style."
—Erika Krouse, author of Contenders and Come Up and See Me Sometime
"These stories dig deep into the ways our minds betray and unravel us. They tap into the ways our minds ricochet between conflicting thoughts. We're lucky Wortman’s companionable voice is here to keep us company, to make the task of enduring our minds' clatter a little less lonely."
—Michelle Ross, The Rupture
"Wortman uses her clear, tender prose to paint a nuanced, realistic, and at times, wryly funny portrait of the day-to-day realities of living."
—Julia Tagliere, SmokeLong Quarterly
"Jennifer Wortman does a lot of things right, but perhaps her finest work is in the stories that depict depression and its nonstop impact on those who struggle with it."
—Joe Walters, Independent Book Review