Can a relationship survive on one person’s love for a beard? Can Shakespeare protect a doomed romance from an angry bee stuck in a car? How does an old iron speak to affairs of the heart? And how can we gauge the secret yearnings of the woman who writes novels about werewolves?

Wry and absurd, pithy and profound, the short fiction of Greg Gerke takes the pulse of couples arriving at the end of something, lovers entering the “unendurable zone.” Moments of improbable grace are salvaged from bitter break-ups, prolonged languor is punctuated by bursts of panic and violence, and the acute pain of thwarted hopes dissipates into indifference. In each of these forty stories, Gerke diagnoses the poisons of heartache with results that pull in two directions at once: comical and grotesque, caustic and humane, sharp-tongued and stirringly sincere.