Funny, tender, quirky, vulnerable, and exquisitely readable, Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love — in seven virtuoso stories — explores contemporary relationships with wicked finesse and humor — perfect for your left-of-center Valentine. Rhodes — one of Granta’s Twenty Best Young British Novelists — writes some of the world’s most idiosyncratically charming, achingly honest stories. In the territory of love, relationships, and sex he has a remarkable skill for poking fun at our rhapsodic moments of longing and heartbreak.
A chance encounter prompts an aging professor to regret a lifetime of wasted opportunities; a beautiful wife tests her husband by making herself hideous; for the love of a girl, a boy turns himself into a violoncello; a man encounters a staggeringly lovely woman in a landfill and returns there constantly. . . . Funny, magical, effete, and strange, in these seven short stories Dan Rhodes lays bare the pain and enchantment of love.