Fools for Love: Stories

by Helen Schulman

A virtuosic, laugh-out-loud collection of stories that explore the fraught and fantastic nature of human connection—featuring women, men, various couples enmeshed in tangled romantic relationships, and one terribly precocious baby.

The wide-ranging and inventive stories that make up Helen Schulman’s Fools for Love are funny, sexy, sometimes sad, and always surprising. A young single American mother and an 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 in a series of stories; 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 young East Village playwright realizes that her marriage to a brilliant young actor is doomed, after watching his performance in an alternative production of the Sam Shepard play.

Characters wander in and out of one another's lives in these hilarious tales of lust and attachment—a rollicking feast of love 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.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Audiobook, Ebooks

208 pages, Hardcover

Published July 8, 2025

About the author

HELEN SCHULMAN is the New York Times best-selling author of six novels, including Come with Me and This Beautiful Life. Schulman has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sundance, Aspen Words, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[TBS · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently had a small French sort of appetizer that was like eating a flaky savory jewel, and I wanted to both slowly prolong and understand the flavor episode of what I was eating, and immediately have another and then another. Reading the entwined stories of Helen Schulman's Fools for Love was a similar experience. There is a forbidden love between a string of poems, an observant young rabbi and a single mother; an admissions officer who finds a doppelganger applicant resembling a long dead boy who spurned her; a terrifyingly self-aware highly critical baby, a sozzled doctor who forces himself to take the longest of long detours home, and a spate of serial divorces, hookups, breakups, deaths, and infidelities. The boundaries are wavy and a mixture of unrelenting undeterred lust mixed with deadpan humor. Schulman has a perfect sense of when to end each piece, which also don’t always end. Main and then background characters flit in and out of these narratives like fireflies, sometimes like moths. And the bigger questions on the nature of desire are there too, and will hang around for quite a while. This is the book you want to have sitting across from you at a favorite café after you’ve both loosened up and had a few drinks and your literary companion starts to open pages and spill spicy, mesmerizing stories. They are bittersweet, funny, a little eerie and flawless. Why would you ever want to leave?

[Salene Schloffel-Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bloody hoot!!!

[Ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I give a book 10 stars? This is one of the very best collections I have ever read. Not a weak story in the bunch. Funny, sad, true as hell stories.

[Erika Dreifus]

I've been a fan of Helen Schulman's short stories for a long time (I'm not sure I realized how long until I ran across one memorable story that I encountered back in the "aughts" smack in the middle of this collection).

I'll confess that I was surprised by when I found the story "Shabbos Goy" here--not only because of the deeper engagement with Jewishness and Judaism (and antisemitism) than I expected from Schulman's work, but also because when I checked the acknowledgments I discovered that the story had been published by Kenyon Review Online (back in 2020: https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-is...). It's one that I'll keep in reserve for the next time I teach my Contemporary Jewish Short Stories class.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome short story collection! Some were really unique and I thought she dared to be a little weird but not TOO weird. Was suprised at the end to realized I’ve read her novels before. They’re all terrible, just see the GR average ratings. But this has a high one. She really shines in the short story form!

[hana · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very solid collection of a good mix of whimsical, charming and emotional short stories. Some were very interesting.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

after reading this i remembered how much i hated “lucky dogs”. these stories were just kinda bland & boring, they didn’t really work for me. i need to stop checking out short story collections…

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bestselling and award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and short story author, Helen Schulman, assembled nine of her previously published stories, plus one new story, into this collection that examines, as the PW review states, "the inescapable need for connection and explores relationships, sex, and love in all its variations." Some of the stories are dark, some are funny, and some are dark and funny. And, a few I didn't get. A couple feature Jewish characters too. On the auidobook, the stories are performed by seven different narrators including the prolific, Edoardo Ballerini and Helen Laser, but the overall reading experience may be better in print.

[Megan O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written complex characters in this collection of interconnected short stories - and yet most of them did not work for me (I just simply need a character I can root for and I had very few of those here)

I really enjoyed the first and last story - and the way some of the characters were filled in throughout - but I just think this was not the collection for me!

Thanks so much to Helen Schuman and NetGalley for a chance to read this in exchange for an honest review.

[Annabelle Handy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read! This collection of interconnected short stories (finding the links between each story is an added joy of reading) lifts you up, takes you down, gets you thinking and leaves you laughing. (Where else can you find anything approaching the hilarious Memoirs of Lucien H.?!) These stories surely resonate differently for different ages - I hope to return to them again in my future to find out how.

[Bren · Rating 3 out of 5]

had to draw a web for the interconnectedness of the characters. eloquent but hard to read at the same time? points for the elderly sex and queer representation. also shoutout pov of a narcissist infant.

[reese gellman · Rating 3 out of 5]

More narrative-by-infant.

Fun collection of (somewhat) intertwined stories. Lot of fools here. Hope Mira can find her fictional way, but her endless romantic plights made for a great short story.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of love stories, I found so much comfort, joy and love in the variety of the tales. This book shows that love is not just romantic. That love can be messy, harsh, painful. But that even through that it is worth it. Beautiful tales, interwoven spectacularly.

[Mir Kuznets · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving and witty, full of endearing, complex characters and memorable scenes. Schulman brings her trademark intelligence and humanity to this sparkling collection.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Helen Schulman is a genius

[Jean Reinhold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Schulman is a great writer - this collection of connected short stories made me want to read her novels.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - if you like short stories these are entertaining. Not usually my genre of choice but read as a book club pick

[Callie Zucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

skillfully written but ultimately flat, rote.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly observed, beautifully written stories about the many different ways we love.

[Heather Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read - stories intertwining just like in life revealing how the 6 degree of separation are often shorter or stretched to max but still present in our lives.

[Gensiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It should have been against the law back then to have been as young as Louise Harrington once was.”

[Sanura · Rating 3 out of 5]

As is the case with short story collections, I enjoyed some more than others, but overall, it's an enjoyable collection of short stories that showcase the messiness of love.

[Erica]

This is one of those books where there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not for me.

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some solid stories here but overall I was left apathetic.

[Raigan Apessos · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked it but im not a huge fan of smaller stories