This truculent anthology of new short stories about love has a quip by Ferdinando Camon for an epigraph: It’s hard to be a woman, they all complain of it. It’s impossible to be a man, none manage. The narrator is a modern woman, in her thirties. In a series of quickly sketched scenes, she paints a droll, sensitive and intelligent portrait of her relationship to men: the husband who becomes the ex-husband, the alcoholic whom she intoxicates with poetry a whole night through, the unfaithful man cut down by his wife (and three bullets), the one-night stand who sticks in her head for much longer, the stud who’s so well-hung that she has to admit defeat, the bastard who’s a good lover, as well as the reactionary father who she finally gets to drop his guard one day… Sophie Képès has a gift for bringing her characters to life, and bestowing them with flesh and blood. Though we often laugh, she never stoops to caricaturing them. The body speaks a lot in this book, often contradicting the brain or betraying the heart: love doesn’t guarantee great sex; great sex doesn’t lead to good conversation; even frank distaste doesn’t always cancel out attraction; you swear never again, and yet…