title: Hearts: Breaking/Mending: Short Stories Relationships: Beginnings and Endings
author:  Stephen Jerome Kohn 
description: Engaging fiction that dissects the concepts of love and attraction In his debut short-fiction collection, Kohn offers vignettes about loves triumphs and casualties. These 19 brief tales resemble an anthropologists notes about urban liaisons. Indeed, the author confesses to jotting down stories during tedious business meetings, and in his tales, readers observe business people similarly trying to carve out time for lasting love. Aromas of Love, sweetly develops a meet-cute between two people surprised to find friendship in the aisles of Zabars in Manhattan. Other stories embrace more expansive possibilities, as in Finding a Lost Diamond, in which Harry, a 50-ish divorced man in Miami Beach ponders if and how other men should mix in his life. June, Roberta and Paul twists a familiar other-woman story into a droll cautionary tale about assumptions and extramarital affairs. Some metaphors, meanwhile, seem unintentionally humorous, as when a couple settles differences quickly, without crumbs left behind lifes cushions to become moldy. Overall, the stories have a direct, to-the-point style, peppered with frequent executive summaries (Middle-age divorce creates a paradise for some men, but for others a hell of self-doubt, with their sensuality sublimated by work) and often read like quickly sketched script outlines. Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744
zlib_text: LET LOVE IN
  
  A.D. ELLIS
  
  CONTENTS
  Chapter 1
  Chapter 2
  Chapter 3
  Chapter 4
  Chapter 5
  Chapter 6
  Chapter 7
  Chapter 8
  Chapter 9
  Chapter 10
  Chapter 11
  Epilogue
  Also by A.D. Ellis
  Acknowledgments
  About the Author
  
  ONE
  
  JACOB “JAKE” OAKLEY
  SO, this was how I would die. A heart attack at age forty. Was a heart attack caused by your heart
  beating too fast? Or from stopping completely? Because mine was doing an odd combination of both.
  I stood at the door—a door I instantly regretted softly tapping on and gently pushing open without
  an invitation—and watched as Keegan danced. I’d come to ask the younger man—the much younger
  man, as in almost two decades younger—if he wanted dinner.
  I thought maybe he needed a break from homework. I thought maybe he needed a friend. What I
  hadn’t thought was that I’d find Keegan, dancing in my spare room, in only silky blue panties trimmed
  with lace.
  I must have gasped at what I saw because Keegan whipped around with a shocked look on his
  face.
  God damn, man. Sto