Meg Smith
Feast of Love
by Charles Baxter
How could this book not be my Valentine's Day pick? The narrative is expansive and generous, the characters sympathetic and all too human. Baxter weaves multiple stories about multiple kinds of love: the passionate sexual kind between two young lovers, the worrying kind that parents can't escape, the melancholy kind that remains once the marriage has ended. As one of the characters says, "Every relationship has at least one really good day," recounting a day when he and his wife visited the Humane Society and adopted a dog. He concludes, "What I'm saying is: that day was here and then it was gone, but I remember it, so it exists somewhere, and somewhere all those events are still happening and still going on forever. I believe that." Got me right in my own romantic heart! (I hesitate to add that in the next chapter, a la Rashoman, his wife suggests a different reality.)

Jay Gesin
Out of the Girl's Room and Into the Night
by Thisbe Nissen
A Book Sense 76 pick. Short stories of love, dating, and experience from a talented young writer. Nissen, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, won the John Simmons Award for short fiction for this book. I think it's a challenge for a writer to hold the reader's attention in a collection of short stories, but I read this one straight through like a novel. Roaming Deadheads, New York cynics, despondent Peace Corps volunteers -- a varied collection of people looking for love, running away from it, or just unexpectedly falling into it. One story after the other, Nissen quickly sets the stage in an opening paragraph, builds a whole character with a few lines of dialogue, and ends almost every story with a sense of the character's future. If you can't spend the night with a loved one, stay up with this book. Or spend the night reading these stories to each other!!

John Son
Complete Fiction of W.M. Spackman
by William Spackman
This enchanting collection of five short novels and two short stories will introduce you to the complete works of one of America's great hidden literary treasures. Spackman (1905 - 1990) was a late bloomer, publishing his first novel, An Armful of Warm Girl, at the mature age of 73. In the eight years that followed, he published the remainder of his oeuvre and established himself as a brilliant stylist, writing delightful, blissful, utterly charming novels about well-to-do middle-aged men and their startlingly lighthearted affairs with a wide range of memorable women. Unabashed and unremorseful, Spackman's language perfectly mirrors the airy world of the chase, the sex, the higgledy-piggledy of being in love. Reading him always makes my toes tingle.

Linda Castellitto
Love Warps the Mind a Little
by John Dufresne
When I first encountered this book, I was drawn to it because of its cover (I know, I know) and, more specifically, its title. It's just true: love makes us all a little nutty. In Love Warps the Mind a Little, our hero Lafayette Proulx is caught in a whirlwind of marital problems, hilariously nasty rejection letters from magazine editors, and the care of a seriously ill loved one. Betwixt and between tending to these matters, there is the meta-story -- Lafayette works out his own struggles by writing about the vagaries of the characters in his own novel-to-be. Multi-layered but not confusing, by turns darkly humorous and sweetly moving, this book is a memorable read.

Patti Neske
Julie and Romeo
by Jeanne Ray
Romeo Cacciamani and Julie Roseman are rival florists in Boston, and, yes, you guessed it -- their families have hated each other for generations, though no one can remember why. By the time Romeo and Julie actually meet for the first time at a small business seminar, they're card-carrying senior citizens. But they know immediately nothing can keep them apart -- not Romeo's 90-year-old mother, or Julie's grown children. Julie and Romeo resembles the Shakespearean tale, but this quirky love story is no tragedy. Though the protaganists are in their sixties, this wonderfully lighthearted read is everyone's love story.