Get Love Is A Four-Letter Word Imagined By Michael Taeckens Mobi

keep a handwritten list of books that I want to read, I'm not entirely sure how this book ended up on that list, but when it did, I listed it as I usually do only by the beginning of the title anything after the colon was left off.


So when I was looking through my list recently for a book that would likely be a quick read, I picked this one because it's relatively short and I thought it was stories about love.
I had long since forgotten that it was about love gone bad, Still, when I picked it up from the library, I decided to go ahead and read it anyway,

Simply put: this book is depressing, The way people treat each other in relationships totally sucks, That some of these authors thought it would be a good idea to put proof of their bad behavior down on paper is beyond my comprehension.
Some of them came off like real jerks others came off like total nut cases and nearly all of the rest showed how entirely tooselfaware most modern writers are in my opinion.
Ugh.

The good news is that it is in fact a quick read, I finished it in a matter of hours over the course of two days, And I must have enjoyed at least one story because I'm giving itstars, Also, it made me feel good about myself that I've managed to comport myself in all of my relationships with a modicum of dignity and respect.
I found most of these stories just disheartening, The authors are often getting high, drunk, or just sleeping around rather than truly looking for good relationships, I also think I may have read this in the past b/c many of the stories seem familiar.
I LOVED THIS BOOK! One of the best collections I've ever read, This caught my eye at the library and I chose it because Dan Kennedyone of my alltime favorite writers and allaround awesome guy I had the pleasure of interviewing him for my literary magazine inwas a contributor.
I read his story first, naturally, then went on to the rest of the pieces from other authors and was very pleasantly surprised there was not a one that I didn't absolutely love.
I recommend this book to anyone and everyone, It's brilliant. I read "Love is a FourLetter Word" out of nostalgia rather than actual interest in the stories, This is a collection of broken heart/relationship stories both heterosexual and homosexual which are sometimes disturbing, funny, and heartbreaking.
If you're feeling bad about your relationships, read some of these stories and I guarantee you'll feel good about even the worst choices.


I expected this to be an uneven collection, and it is some of the essays are good, and some just go nowhere, but they're all so heartfelt that I feel guilty singling out the ones that were less than enthralling.


I'm always interested in anthologies like this, though many authors, one overarching idea,

Something I learned about myself after reading this: I have never had any relationships as thrilling or as horrible as any of these writers have.


One totally nitpicky thing that I honestly never notice enough to comment on, with most books, so if I noticed, it must have been really bad: the cover is just so damn busy.
Yikes. Your eye isn't drawn to any one thing and it's offputting, Faced with a magazine story that is part anecdote and part educational information, I am very likely to just read the anecdotal bits.
This book is all anecdotes, so I liked it quite a bit, I'd let it sit on my to be read pile for a long time because I feared a book of breakup stories would depress me, but that didn't turn out to be the case, probably because by the time these authors wrote about the incidents, the pain was not still fresh.
If you're thinking of not reading this because you think it might be depressing, think again, Yes, it is about breakups, bad relationships, and broken hearts, but there is an immense amount of uplifting sentiment and lessons learned in these pages.
And a healthy dose of hilarity, too,
I picked this one up for the Kate Christensen story and was totally sucked in, Funny how everyone has bad, good, humiliating memories about the people in our past and how easily all that comes back when reading someone else's version, especially with a glass of wine in hand.
Very good.

Still, on that mountain I learned something invaluable: there are two types of people, The first kind pretend to know things they don't, the second kind choose to ignore things they do, I'm the second kind. Amanda Stern For anyone that has been burned in love, I'm CRAZY about this book!!!! Famous authors revealed their worst relationships in short story form, I loaned it to someone months ago and it hasn't come back, That damned good. Particularly liked the comic strips and the pieces by Junot Diaz and Jami Attenberg, but fairly rough reading, I was really looking forward to this book, Unfortunately I found the stories so useless and unpleasant that I could not read more than five of them.
Now, there might be some gems in this book, but randomly picking out five stories gave me a sense of uniform badness.


The stories I read were about people making stupid decisions in their lives to take up with losers or worse, and in the end they part ways.
Yawn. Not interesting or entertainingly told either, Um, how did this get published This book was a collection of essays about bad relationships and bad break ups that writers experienced in theirs.
There are some doozies in here and I found myself both laughing and cringing, I'm truly blessed, and am very happy to be out of mys, by the way, Every bad decision I ever made, every lovegonewrong I've ever experienced, every heart I've broken including my own is represented here.
That might not sound fun, but this was a really fun book to read, Great memoiristic pieces. Nice to know I'm not the only one, . .
I picked this up thinking it would be comforting to read about other people's misfortune in love, It wasn't. It was depressing. And disgusting. And kind of creepy. The only reason why I stuck with it is because they were short stories, so I only had to suffer in small doses.
Very ready to move on to something more uplifting, And more sane. Ive grown leery of the essay anthology after the horrible experience I had reading Things I Would Have Learned in Englishif I Hadnt Skipped Class to Have Sex, I mean, Things I Learned from the Women Who Dumped Me.
The book was so awful and cliched that I feared I had be scarred for life,

Then I kept reading about Love is a FourLetter Word, subtitled True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, edited by Michael Taeckens.
It worried me and then I saw that the introduction was by Neal Pollack, and made me even more worried.
But ultimately I was won over by the author list Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Dan Kennedy, and Said Saytafiezadeh.


Thank god I put my fears aside and dove in, This was fun.

sitelinkRead More Kind of perfect timing to read this book, There were some pieces that left me grateful that none of the break ups in my life have been that crazy.
Then there were pieces that were sad and poignant and left me feeling somewhat voyeuristic,

Definitely a moodspecific book, I couldn't have read this if I were in the throes of a new and blooming relationship, From Junot Daz, Lynda Barry, Gary Shteyngart, and Kate Christensen to popular upandcomers like Dan Kennedy, Wendy McClure, and Brock Clarke, Love Is a FourLetter Word is a deadon contemporary collection of true stories of seduction, heartbreak, and regret.
Fearlessly revealing their shattered hearts and crushed egos their indiscretions and indignities their delusions, desperation, and disappointments, these talented writers capture the dark side of love in prose ranging from comic to poetic, poignant to cringeinducing.
Also featuring three cartoon/ graphic essays as a sixteenpage color insert, this anthology is perfect for anyone who's ever loved and lost.
Real, truthful and Funny stories about breakups, . . : I didn't finish this book, I gotpages in and found it pretty dull, I was hoping that it would have been a little more dramatic, sad, heartwrenching, etc, This book was kind of a poor me, random whatever breakups, I didn't find it very interesting, while jared amp i were in boston for the holidays, we stopped by the harvard bookstore to do some window shopping.
my feet were really tired, so i pulled this book off the shelf amp sat down on the padded bench by the graphic novels to read amp rest.
i wound up getting really absorbed, it was pretty smart for the editor to lead off with junot diaz's story about his girlfriend finding out he cheated on her right before they left to travel together in the dominican republic, helping out some volunteer dentists amp later attacking a decorative turtle shell mounted on the wall of their motel.
that was probably the best story in the book, i also really enjoyed lynda barry's comic which i choose to believe is about ira glass, the smarmy bastard, but it's also in her book, demons, so it wasn't really a huge selling point.
demons is probably better, because it's ALL lynda barry, with no boring stories about exfiancees dying of cirrhosis.
i didn't come for tales of wow, i came for tales of LOL at other people's expense! there's nothing funny about people dying without allowing their loved ones closure.


but i was psyched about the emily flake comic, that woman is a comedy genius! i love how much expression she gets on her characters with such economical lines.
that was probably why i bought the

book, amp i scarfed it all up on the plane ride back to kansas city.
usually anthologies like this are fun for a little while amp then they lose their luster because they're padded out with a bunch of filler only tangentially related to the topic at hand in this case, shitty relationships amp bad breakupspossibly mymost favorite topic of conversation, even though it's been years since i've had anything to contribute.
you can tell who got the call for submissions amp went digging in their files for something already written that they could use as a publishing credit.
even though i am sure that happened with this anthology too, i really enjoyed it, folks who don't enjoy relationshipsbased gallows humor amp aren't as amused by other people's emotional pain as i am probably won't love it as much, but it was right up my alley.
oh, except for the very weird/based story, what the hell was that the writing was good, but, . . seriously you dated some dude for three months amp had panic attacks about/, even though you live in chicago, amp the dude sounded like a total douche amp that was your worst breakup what are you,it gets worse, trust me.
.