The Secret Lives of People in Love (P.S.)

Simon Van Booy's stories have the power and resonance of poems. They stay with you like a significant memory.-Roger Rosenblatt

Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.-Fred Volkmer

The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

“Breathtaking. . .chillingly beautiful, like postcards from Eden. . .Van Booys stories are somehow like paintings the characters walk out of, and keep walking.” -Los Angeles Times

In his critically-acclaimed debut collection of short stories, The Secret Lives of People in Love, Simon Van Booy explores the sway of fate and power of memory on the lives of lonely and vulnerable people. With the same spare, economical prose that he brought to his subsequent collection, Love Begins in Winter, winner of the 2009 Frank OConnor Short Story Award, Van Booy creates a profoundly humane and somber resonance with the assured hand of “a first-rate storyteller” (Newsday). The Secret Lives of People in Love announces the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales. He is the author of Love Begins in Winter—which won the International Frank O'Connor Prize. His non-fiction has appeared in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the New York Post. He lives in New York City, where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts and is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities Program (REaCH) for young adults living in underserved communities. His work has been translated into nine different languages.