What Is This Thing Called Love?

Book excerpt: The actor and novelist answers this eternal question twelve ways, in stories that explore our most complicated emotion This is a winning collection from an author writing on his favorite topic: love. Each emotionally involving story illuminates a different kind of love: star-crossed, intense, needy, eternal, unrequited, even comical. Gene Wilder's protagonists will be instantly recognizable to his fans: men and women who stumble into relationships that can fulfill them or knock them out cold. Which one it will be depends, often, on the smallest of gestures or reactions. What Is This Thing Called Love includes the stories: • "In Love for the First Time," about a lover so shy and studious that he's a "funny duck" who has to be led by the hand by his equally inexperienced girlfriend • "About Being in Love," featuring coarse but charming Buddy Silverman, who yearns for connection but looks for it in exactly the wrong kind of woman • "The Woman in the Red Hat," who shows a writer who has only explored love in his books what the real thing feels like.