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This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. contains thirteen stories, full-length and flash, that explore love—sexual, platonic, filial, and beyond—in its gritty and beguiling forms. A small-town teenager pursues an eccentric pinball wizard after her grandfather’s move to her home shakes up her parents’ marriage; a chronic depressive turns to a TV animal psychic in hopes of mending her relationship with her dog-loving dad; a middle-aged recovering alcoholic goes back to college and becomes fixated on his stern professor. As characters in various stages of life try to navigate love, they court obsession, madness, and transcendence.

Praise for This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.

I love Jenny Wortman’s stories! They are strange, sad, and funny. More important, Wortman is a writer wise to the perils of our fragile minds, which can be brought low by demons of mental health. Mercy and imagination are our only hope. These stories have them in spades.

—Steve Almond, author of Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country

Jennifer Wortman’s diverse stories are absolutely electric. They explore self-consciousness with unfailing wit and candor, while revealing our most hidden hurts and desires. In substance and style, they’re a literary funhouse. What an intimate, wise, nervy, and soaring collection from a remarkable writer.

—Steven Schwartz, author of Madagascar: New and Selected Stories

This. This. This. Is. Fabulous. I love this book! Jennifer Wortman’s stories cover narrative territory such as depression, isolation, sexual relationships, and family dysfunction, pairing pain with the humor and joy of Wortman’s fresh and inimitable style. This debut collection stuns and delights. I look forward to reading more from this brilliant, vibrant author.

—Erika Krouse, author of Contenders and Come Up and See Me Sometime

Wortman manages to find the beauty in even the darkest subjects. Though her prose never loses the conversational tone of her first-person narrators, it cuts through her characters’ defenses in the same breath to crystallize the experience of loving and being loved, and of living with the darkly calibrated emotions of depression. The tenderness and care for each character’s self-destructive tendencies sings off the page, casting each story as an act of empathetic observation devoid of judgment.

—Allison Epstein, Necessary Fiction

Wortman’s debut seems like anything but. Rather, it is a kind of clinic in short-fiction artistry, laden with truth, humor and keen observation, a 21st-century meditation on the perpetual entanglement of human love and suffering.

—Clay Evans, Boulder Daily Camera

Jennifer Wortman’s new collection of short stories . . . illustrates the complexities of love through sharp dialogue and character development. She pushes beyond the traditional conceptions of fairy-tale love and excavates an experiential version—one much more practical and realistic, in which her characters struggle to reconcile their beliefs of what love should be with how they experience it.

—Yousef Allouzi, Atticus Review

Wortman handles depression like a docent introducing a crowd to a venomous serpent . . .She knows this animal. She is an expert on its diet, its behaviors, its needs.

—Michelle Ross, The Rupture

Wortman uses her clear, tender prose to paint a nuanced, realistic, and at times, wryly funny portrait of the day-to-day realities of living with mental health issues, exploring as well how inextricably our mental health is intertwined with other aspects of our lives, like family dynamics, isolation, and addiction. 

—Julia Tagliere, SmokeLong Quarterly

With string-tight plotlines and unique characters, the stories in this collection manage to entertain as well as illuminate the invisible things we share. These stories shed light on the heartbreak in hope and illustrate the perils and triumphs of being human, of acting and reacting, of loving and living.

—Joe Walters, Independent Book Review

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