Books are a part of the landscape in Helen Schulman’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the dining room, they compete for space among the tchotchkes and old family photos. They’re in the bedroom, too, and on the floors and tables. “It’s a mess,” Schulman says of the apartment, where she lives with her husband, the author Bruce Handy. “Our whole house is like somebody else’s garage. My son, when he was little, asked, ‘Is daddy a hoarder?’ We’re not the most organized, but it’s warm. We’re the reading family. Instead of jewels and art we have books.”

Schulman is a bestselling novelist, screenwriter, and short story author, and a 2019 Guggenheim fellow and Pushcart Prize winner. She often writes about what she calls “earthquakes in the culture”—9/11, the rise of technology, the #MeToo movement. She’s the author of nine books, including her 1988 debut, the story collection Not a Free Show, as well as the novels A Day at the Beach, This Beautiful Life, P.S., and Lucky Dogs, which is being developed as a feature film. Her books have been published in Denmark, Germany, and the U.K., according to her publisher, Knopf.

Schulman’s dazzling and funny new collection, Fools for Love, out in July and her first in more than 25 years, is composed of 10 stories—one new and nine published over the past three decades—that examine the inescapable need for connection and explore relationships, sex, and love in all its variations. “The stories are about female agency and sexuality,” Schulman says, “and about people’s attachments to each other, which in some cases are stronger than love.”

The collection is anchored by the titular “Fools for Love,” which Schulman wrote in 2024 and which centers on the unconventional marriage of a playwright, Anna, and her gay husband, Miguel, who try to sustain a platonic but codependent partnership while having relationships on the side. The other nine stories originally appeared in magazines and journals (GQ, Tin House, Ploughshares) and have been refreshed for the book, with tweaks made to language and cultural references. Highlights include “The Memories of Lucien H,” about a demanding baby who sabotages his mother’s love life, and “The Revisionist,” a John Cheever–esque tale about a family man’s mental breakdown, which inspired Schulman’s 1998 novel of the same name.

Schulman says it’s gotten harder over the years to locate her older stories online—some publications lack decent archives—and she didn’t want them to disappear. “You can’t find my stories anywhere. I’m a big sand mandala person. You spend your time making this beautiful sand mandala and put your life and love into it, and blow it away. But I wanted these stories to exist, and the only way to do that is to get them in the Library of Congress.”

Jennifer Barth, Schulman’s editor, to whom Fools for Love is dedicated, praises the author for her ability to create work that’s both timely and timeless. “Helen is a total mensch and a pro,” Barth says. “She has a satirical eye for social realism and the way we live now, but her books are classically structured, the kinds of books that will endure.”

Schulman was born in 1961 in New York City, the daughter of a psychiatrist father and social worker mother. Her grandparents were refugees from Russia and Europe, and her maternal grandmother, with whom Schulman shared a bedroom growing up, lost siblings in the Holocaust. “There was so much pain in our house,” Schulman recalls. “Trauma and loss—it’s inherited.”

She grew up quickly in the city. “My mother would give me $2 a day: one for my front pocket, one for my back pocket, in case I was mugged,” she says. As a teen, she danced into the night at legendary clubs CBGB and Hurrah; “I barely went to school,” she adds.

The bookish party girl received a BA from Cornell in 1983 and an MFA from Columbia in 1986—her graduate thesis, a selection of fiction pieces, became her debut story collection. She met Handy at a magazine party, where he was working as a bartender as a favor to the host. “I was dating my husband when my first book came out,” Schulman says. “I’d ask him, ‘Can we just look at my book again?’ I just carried it around.”

Ever since her student days, Schulman has been a sucker for beautiful prose. “When I first read William Faulkner,” she recalls, “it rearranged my molecules.” Schulman has taught writing at Bard and Emory and is now a tenured professor of writing and the fiction chair at the New School, as well as the executive director of WriteOn NYC, a program that helps place writing teachers in middle and high schools. “I’m proud of my students,” she says. “Their happiness and success increases my happiness.”

Schulman’s own literary support system includes her agent, Sloan Harris, whom she’s known for three decades. Years ago, while attending a Paris Review party thrown by George Plimpton, Schulman accidentally locked herself in a bathroom, and Harris was the only one who looked for her. “Even my husband didn’t notice I was gone,” she cracks.

Harris calls Schulman one of his all-time favorite writers and highlights her work as a professor. “The intensity of Helen’s prose always gets me,” he says. “When she gives me pages, I get extremely jealous and impatient for more. I cannot tell you how many people I run into who credit her for being the inspiration for their writer’s life. She’s helping the future of our business.”

Schulman has had a lifelong interest in telling women’s stories. “My work is about how hard it is to be a girl,” she says. Filled with humor and style, the pieces in her new collection examine the joys and absurdities of looking for love—whether it’s a love triangle between destructive friends, as in “My Best Friend,” or a disgruntled widow seeking a late-in-life tryst in “I Am Seventy-Five.”

And while she enjoys ruminating on the modern world, Schulman admits she’s totally tech averse: she doesn’t have a website, thinks social media is alienating, and can’t figure out her TV remote half the time. She enjoys yoga and watching her Siamese cats cause trouble. But books are her treasures and her therapy. “I get my crazy out through my books,” she says. Her life’s mission is unwavering: “I’m here to write.”

Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.