How much did I love Robert Shearman’s short story collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical? So much so that I took my time reading it. You might think that if you really love a writer’s work you’d gobble down all his stories as quickly as possible, but no, I wanted this to last. Now it’s done and I’m wishing the book had been longer. Much longer.

You often hear people say that a certain book seems to have been written for them alone, and though that’s a cliché, in this case, it felt very much the truth, because all of the stories in the collection dealt with love in one form or another, and I feel that all of my stories (yes, even my zombie ones) are love stories, too. As Ted Sturgeon wrote in his essay “Why So Much Syzygy?” (and as I quoted in the introduction to my own collection What We Still Talk About):

I think what I have been trying to do all these years is to investigate the matter of love, sexual and asexual. I investigate it by writing about it because …I don’t know what the hell I think until I tell somebody about it.

And so Shearman writes touching and funny and whimsical tales like the one about a couple who literally gave each other their hearts, and the one about a world in which the percentage of the love that you feel for each person you know can be measured, and then there’s the one about a man who heads off on a cruise to dispose of his late wife’s ashes only to learn, well, you’ll find out when you read it … and more.

And after all of these already amazing stories, one of which even got me verklempt, there comes a tour de force (I know, I feel that word is overused, too, but this time it truly is a tour de force) in which Shearman critiques all those other stories that came before. In the collection’s penultimate story, “Not About Love,” Shearman (yes, it’s a metafictional story is about Shearman himself) arrives at an awards ceremony where he is nominated for the very book you’re reading, and is assailed by the elderly patron after whom the award is named.

When he says to her about his book that, “what’s love, really, but a series of short stories,” she replies (in part):

Yes, I read your back cover blurb. But it’s bollocks, that, isn’t it? … Love isn’t a short story at all. It’s an epic poem by Dante. It’s the complete works of Shakespeare. It’s a writer’s entire oeuvre; look at Stendhal, Flaubert, Lawrence even, it’s vast and it bursts out of whatever tries to contain it. …

Your stories, they hide from love. All the silly jokes you play, all your little bits of absurdism, the heart in the Tupperware box, the rabbit with wings—it’s all amusing for a while, yes, but I kept on saying, when’s he actually going to engage with the subject? When’s he going to drop the gimmick, and make me feel something? …

I’ve been in love so many times. Had love affairs, some brief, some lifelong. But none of them have been shy or cynical. And none of them, I can assure you, have ever been short stories.

And she doesn’t stop there. Nor does the story. Nor does the collection (because there’s still one final story to go). And all of the individual stories come together, validating exactly what the fictional Shearman told us—love really IS a series of short stories.

So go buy his book. And just in case you want a taste before splurging, you can listen to him reading a story from Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical here first. But then do buy it.

You may find yourself thinking he’s written it just for you as well.