Love/Imperfect

New short stories from Christopher T. Leland that explore love in all of its forms and complexities.

Whether it is romantic, parental, or platonic, we all aspire to find perfect love, even though we know love is notoriously imperfect. Depending on the lover and the beloved, love can be unrequited, blind, feigned, cowardly, confused, and even murderous. In this compelling new collection, Christopher T. Leland explores the notion of such imperfect love in eighteen stories, as characters struggle to understand both love's essential strangeness and its shifting meaning over time.

While each story points to the tremendous task of understanding the human heart, each also suggests that the notion of loving--even at its most violent and terrible--is a gift. In the moment of murder, the nameless narrator of "Traveler" loves his victim just as estranged friends and former lovers Esther and Tim still somehow love each other in "Reprise." Young husband and wife Del and Dora love each other despite the pressures of war, meddling families, and childbirth in "How the Coe Boys Got Their Names," as Gogan loves his uncle even though the uncle's violence becomes too much to bear in "Last Frontier." Even the horrified father of "Swim" grants to his mad son an opportunity to control his own destiny, while the sentimental father of "Peach Queen" offers to his son a talisman of their bond.

Leland's deftly crafted characters and narratives find their power in the thrilling space between love and uncertainty, distress, and even terror. Fans of short fiction will enjoy the profound and intriguing stories in Love/Imperfect.

“There is a surprising edginess in Leland's stories that has nothing to do with their edgy subject matter, but with timing, the multitude of one-line paragraphs in which so much happens so swiftly. The many asides give the stories their strange power, as if they are being overheard rather than read."”

As in real life, gay mingles with straight in Leland's first collection (after five novels), 17 shimmering sensual short stories linked by the thematic threads of intimacy and love...Leland's supple, succinct prose marks him as a short story virtuoso."

In his satisfying first story collection (after Letting Loose), Leland deals with the wonders of in- timacy, portraying a broad range of relationships, from the engaged couple of 'Casing the " Promised Land, ' whose interactions are full of missed connections and lovely synchronicity, to the frank sex talks of the gay couple at the center of 'Fellatio, ' without sacrificing unity of theme and approach. In the first-person stories the reader becomes the narrator's confidante, whereas third-person turns the same reader into a voyeur.

Seventeen sensual tales, linked by the thematic threads of intimacy, desire and love, depict worried mothers, absent fathers, inter-class sexual affairs and men afraid of their desires. Leland's supple prose marks him as a short story virtuoso.

Christopher T. Leland was a novelist, translator, scholar, poet, and teacher. He was professor of English at Wayne State University, where he had taught since 1990. He was the author of nine other books, including Meantime, The Book of Marvels, and Letting Loose.

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