Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Tales of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts edited by Michael Taeckens (Plume, $16 trade paper, 9780452295506/0452295505, July 28, 2009)

Cautionary tales of bad relationships seem not to dent the promise of true love. If they did, we wouldn't have as much great literature--or some of the current political scandals. Even so, they tell us our story in illuminating ways, if we are of a mind to be illuminated. If we aren't, at least there's the momentary satisfaction of schadenfreude. As Neal Pollack says in the introduction, "It's always nice to know that no matter how badly you've screwed up your love life, someone else has done far, far worse."

Michael Taeckens, whose day job is publicity director at Algonquin, has assembled a fine writers' collection, from the comic to the tragic, beginning with Junot Diaz in "Homecoming, with Turtle." Diaz and his girlfriend decide to spend their vacation in Santo Domingo, a minefield of family stories and expectations. "It was miserable. If one of us wasn't storming off down the road with a backpack, the other one was trying to hitch a ride to the airport with strangers." Who hasn't been there? Or with Wendy McClure as she tries to figure out what she sees in Ben: "I thought of his silverware drawer and how the spoons and forks lay under a sedimentary layer of cereal bits and cat hair." Josh Kilmer-Purcell, in "Tweny-five to One Odds," goes home with a gorgeous model, who says that sex with him was like co-starring in a porn movie. But it's an odd porn movie when Kilmer-Purcell realizes, on the third date, that the guy can't have sex without watching Wonder Woman. "It's possible to overthink things, but if I had that specific a fetish, I'd probably have to put a little thought into its origin." And Taeckens, in "The Book of Love and Transformation," was rudely dumped, and laments, "I didn't even know they had crabs in the Midwest, let alone that you could get them from a professor."

Many of the stories are darker, filled with sadness and anger. Kate Christensen, in "Shadow Dancing," relates discovering her own sexual attractiveness, at age 15, with a 36-year-old man, a chaperone on a class trip to Mazatlán. In "The First Time," Margaret Sartor describes heartbreak perfectly: "The shattering of trust, the brutal sense of loss and sudden awareness of my heart's true vulnerability, like a tree branch snapping off in an ice storm. I had no idea about that." Amanda Stern, in "Scout's Honor," lets her boyfriend talk her into a camping trip, while she'd rather lead the Janjaweed through a series of trust exercises. But she goes, to a mountain no less, because she believes him when he says she's in his good hands. Turns out that he takes a harder trail up, and after a miserable, wet night, he literally pushes her back down the washed-out trail, in the rain, while he packs up. She fractures her wrist but makes it down alone and later realizes a profound truth about herself.
 
Heartbreak, humor, humiliation, and self-discovery--it's all here in this collection. With crabs. And poignancy. And Wonder Woman.--Marilyn Dahl
 
Shelf Talker: A collection of stories about bad relationships and broken hearts, with plenty of wit, an abundance of woe and some hard-won wisdom.