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. (more…)