Coffee House Wednesday : Fools for love
Date
Location
Sponsors
Admission
RSVP required
Program is FREE to attend
About the Event
The Coffee House Club invites Salmagundi members to join author Helen Schulman as she discusses her funny, sexy and always surprising new collection of short stories, with author Jill Bialosky.
Hungry?
Ticketed attendees are welcome to stay for dinner by indicating so in their Eventbrite RSVP.
There will be an a la carte menu to choose from. On the day of the event, you can pay for your meal with a card or your membership account (no cash).
About Fools for Love
A virtuosic, laugh-out-loud collection of stories that explore the fraught and fantastic nature of human connection—featuring women, men, various couples, and one terribly precocious baby enmeshed in tangled romances of all shapes and sizes. The wide-ranging and inventive stories that make up Helen Schulman’s Fools for Love are funny, sexy, sometimes sad, and always surprising.
A single American mother and a French Orthodox rabbi fall in love over poetry, as she helps to dismantle a shuttered bookstore in Paris. A rebellious young woman marries a series of men who are all wrong for her and proceeds to cheat on each of them; her widowed mother finds her deceased husband’s sex diaries and decides she needs to make up for lost time. And in the title story, a blossoming East Village playwright realizes that her marriage to a brilliant actor is doomed, after watching his performance in an alternative production of Sam Shepard’s iconic play.
Characters wander in and out of one another’s stories—and beds—in these hilarious tales of lust and attachment—a rollicking feast of love and loss that is not unlike the experience of life itself. Fools for Love is a vital addition to Schulman’s acclaimed body of work—a collection that showcases at every turn what Katie Kitamura has referred to as her “sharp observation, buoyant wit, and unfailing empathy.”
About the Presenters
Helen Schulman is a novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. Her collection of stories, Fools for Love, was published by Knopf in July 2025. Prior to publication, the title story will be published in The Atlantic. Her newest novel, Lucky Dogs, was one of Oprah Daily’s top ten novels of 2023. She is also the author of the novels Come With Me (San Francisco Chronicle ten best books of 2019) This Beautiful Life (a New York Times and International Best Seller), A Day At The Beach, P.S., (made into a motion picture starring Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Paul Rudd and Marcia Gay Harden, for which Professor Schulman has a screenwriting credit), The Revisionist and Out Of Time (Barnes and Noble Discovery), and the short story collection Not A Free Show. She co-edited the anthology Wanting A Child with Jill Bialosky. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, A Public Space and The Paris Review. She is the Fiction Chair at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Professor of Writing. She is also the Executive Director of WriteOnNYC.com. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Schulman has been a NYFA Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Aspen Words Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Fellow (Columbia University) and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize
Jill Bialosky’s newest work of prose is The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother. Her most recent volume of poetry Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Deceptions, a finalist for the Gotham Book Award, and a two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Paris Review and Best American Poetry among others. She co-edited with Helen Schulman the anthology, Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.