How to Stop Loving Someone: Stories

Sprightly, sanguine writing infuses these 13 tales of faulty love and fizzled connections with a compelling energy and likability. The kickoff story in Conner’s new collection, “Men in Brown,” features a solitary woman who works at home in Vermont and develops a crush on her UPS man. The narrator, describing herself as an agoraphobe and claustrophobe who “rattles around in my house like a stray thought,” shares a litany of crushingly depressing dates with men, while fantasizing hilariously about her uniformed delivery man (“all that well-packaged pulchritude”) who remarks smartly on the books delivered to her door because he reads, too. Other stories sound themes of hopeful relationships, mismatched men and women trying desperately to fall in love, like the middle-aged couple out walking along the beach in “The Fox” whose different reactions to the fox (the man needs to get closer to take a picture, the woman is content to observe its beauty) indicate their own elusive link. A couple who meet at a hardware conference, in “What It Is,” later spend several disappointing days together, colliding constantly against leavened expectations and hardened civilities. Connor (History Lessons) catches the zeitgeist fearlessly and with verve. (Oct.)