In How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage. Not best-served by established conventions and conventional mores, these people-young, old, gay, straight, midwestern, coastal-are finding their own paths in learning who they are and how they want to love and be loved, even when those paths must be blazed through the unknown. Concerning husbands and wives, lovers and leavers, Nissen's stories explore our search for connection and all the ways we undercut it, unwittingly and intentionally, when we do find it. How do we hold ourselves together-to function, work, and survive-while endlessly yearning to be undone, unraveled, and laid bare, however untenable and excruciating? How Other People Make Love contains nine stories. "Win's Girl" features a single woman who works at an Iowa slaughterhouse and uses the insurance money from a car accident to update the electric system in her dead parents' old house, only to be unwittingly embroiled with a shady electrician who ultimately forces her to stand up for herself. In "Home Is Where the Heart Gives Out and We Arouse the Grass," a young woman flees after cheating on her husband and winds up at a Nebraska roadside motel populated by participants in a regional dog show who help her decide what to do next. In "Unity Brought Them Together," a young man heads to his favorite New York coffee shop intending to finish the Christmas cards his vacationing fiancee insists on sending, but winds up meeting another displaced young midwestern man there and going home with him instead. All these stories explore the question, "how do we love?" as well as the answers we find, discard, follow, banish, and cling to in all our humanness and desperation. How Other People Make Love asserts that there aren't right and wrong ways to love; there are only our very complicated and contradictory human hearts, minds, bodies, and desires-all searching for something, whether we know what that is or not. These are stories for anyone who has ever loved or been loved.

In Thisbe Nissen's award-winning debut story collection, characters teeter on the verge of love, of life, of oncoming cataclysms after which Things Will Never Be the Same. Against the varied backdrops of Grateful Dead shows, anniversary parties, sickrooms, and bright Manhattan vestibules, Nissen traces the joy, terror, and electric surprise that flash between people as they suddenly connect. A fifteen-year-old girl whose mother is slowly dying finds solace in the bed of her best friend's older brother. A wife remembers the early romance in her marriage as she watches her husband's hand, shaky with Parkinson's, lift a bite of food to his mouth. Longtime friends are jolted by their unforeseen attraction to each other; new lovers feel their way by instinct in vans, on futons, an during risky, late-night conversation. Knowing, often hilarious, and always pitch-perfect, Nissen's tales hang inside those moments when the heart is acting and the head is watching, hopeful that the heart is doing the right thing.

As she steps back to survey the damage and determine her way forward, Phillipa must contend with a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her otherwise docile husband. Which is to say: the damage is not easily contained, and the path ahead is not clear. Thisbe Nissen offers up a fever-pitched, bitingly funny novel about a woman's quest to find her place in her own story. Our Lady of the Prairie is a bravura performance - a twister sweeping through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.

From a thrillingly talented 28-year-old newcomer - the Anne Tyler for a new generation, yet with a distinctive voice and quirky sensibility all of her own - comes a contemporary novel that brings to life a few of the 'good people of New York' and renders them in all their neurotic glory. When Roz Rosenzweig, self-described spitfire and loud n' proud New York Jew, meets Edwin Anderson at a party in the 1970s in her friend's Manhatten apartment, she has trouble believing that the earnest and soft-spoken Nebraskan is for real. But Roz is quickly attracted to Edwin and is more happy than stunned when their improbable courtship results in marriage. The unexpected good fortune of Roz and Edwin is punctuated with the birth of their daughter Miranda; and yet, as Miranda grows, it becomes clear that Roz's love for her is so fierce, so protective and so singularly focused that it might crowd out anything else in her life - including her marriage. The ties that bind Roz and her daughter together threaten to strangle Miranda as she enters her teenage years, and yet the eccentric group of friends they attract, their powerful love for one another, and the brilliant sense of humour that runs in the family, allow Roz and Miranda - along with Edwin, who remains in their lives - to somehow stay sane, even as they fight one another for room to grow.

In this luminous first novel from the author of an acclaimed short story collection (Out Of the Girls' Room and Into the Night) Thisbe Nissen proves that hers is one of the most genuinely charming, witty and accomplished literary voices to emerge in quite some time.