Jami Attenberg's Instant Love is a winsome collection of (sometimes tenuously) related short stories, all focusing on the varieties and vagaries of love over a period of years in the lives of three young women, their friends, and their lovers. It describes -- in ways that will make your heart clutch up in painful remembrance -- those moments of precise realization that come with falling in love, or out of love.

My favorite story is "Sarah Lee Meets a Millionaire," which shows so clearly how each of us exists in our own solipsistic world, sometimes touching, but never really connecting, with anyone else. (I do have to say, though, that I didn't get the cover picture at all, until my husband took one look at it and explained it to me - it's a melting popsicle, for anyone else who had the same problem.)