Amy Bloom

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome back award-winning novelist and short story writer AMY BLOOM as she reads from her recently released collection of linked stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, newly out in paperback.

A young woman is haunted by her roommate’s murder; a man and his daughter-in-law confess their sins in the unlikeliest of places; two middle-aged, married friends find themselves surprisingly drawn to each other, risking all for their love but never underestimating the cost. Where the God of Love Hangs Out takes us to the margins and the centers of people’s emotional lives, exploring the changes that come with love and loss.

"One by one, they march across the proscenium of Amy Bloom's new story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. They are grouchy academics, pissed-off orphans, and melancholy middle-aged lawyers. They are characters as real as ourselves and our friends, but mysteriously rendered lovable. What makes a character lovable? It's a mysterious thing, the fact that a reader can fall in love with a nonexistent person. If we want to understand how this happens, we ought to look closely at Bloom's collection, which is like a lovability primer." —Slate

"There are a lot of losses in Where the God of Love Hangs Out, and not just because some of its characters age dramatically. Ms. Bloom is as interested in the forces that rupture bonds as in the ones that, against all odds and sometimes at terrible risk, manage to create them. The subtle, stirring title story ably illustrates Ms. Bloom’s tremendous gift for imagining life as a series of choices, with the paths not taken as vivid as the ones that are."
—The New York Times