A Circle is a Balloon and a Compass Both: Stories about Human Love by Ben Greenman

Alex V. Cook's review
rating:

This book is not as dry nor as funny as his Superbad, but then nothing short of David Sedaris is. It is a suite of stories about love in its neatly compartmentalized forms (both love and the stories themselves, actually) and while some are touching and others a little alienating, they all resonate in a peculiar way, like an alien observer trying to explain love as it observes it. The characters in these stories don;t even quite understand their own loves, nor those of the people with which they are engaging in it. Tenderness but with nearly all the sweetness titrated out of it. Here he finds strains of love left in the loveless and in that way is a very contemporary type of romance, but don't go expecting chocolates or anything.

xposted at Goodreads