Elinor Lipman

This collection's centerpiece charts an offbeat romance that begins in line at the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, where Tim, a gentle graphic designer, meets beautiful, single Hannah who is nine months pregnant. "Only a sick person would ask a hugely pregnant woman to dinner and consider it the best date of his life," worries Tim. Here are men and women who aren't as cool as they'd like to be, who have good jobs but are intimidated by secretaries, who like sex but keep their bathing suits on in a hot tub, who apologize often and obsess easily, and who find happiness in the most unexpected of places.

Reviews and praise

"Lipman's short stories are filled with sweet, complex people in unusual relationships... (They are) charming in a finely etched way, contain some wry, delightful twists of plot and oblique, often painful, dialogue. These people slide by each other, connecting only on occasion, their connections graced by both joy and despair, much ambiguity, and accommodation to different kinds of love."Library Journal

"Into Love and Out Again is an afternoon delight. Breezy, wry with just a shade of sex...a warm, playful, curl-up-and-read volume that's over all too soon."Ft. Worth Star Telegram

"A Superb collection...I can't remember when I last rooted for a character as I did for Tim."New Woman

"These zesty stories are comedies of manner in miniature, inform by Elinor Lipman's assured sense of the contemporary. Her witty observations of American ways of being would make Noel Coward proud."David Leavitt