Bloom vividly chronicles the inner lives of people caught in emotional and physical constraints — illnesses they are striving to survive, regrets they are trying to allay, desires they often dare not fulfill. She writes in beautifully wrought prose, with spunky humor and a flair for delectably eccentric details.

One by one, they march across the proscenium of Amy Bloom's new story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. They are grouchy academics, pissed-off orphans, and melancholy middle-aged lawyers. They are characters as real as ourselves and our friends, but mysteriously rendered lovable. What makes a character lovable? It's a mysterious thing, the fact that a reader can fall in love with a nonexistent person. If we want to understand how this happens, we ought to look closely at Bloom's collection, which is like a lovability primer.

There are a lot of losses in “Where the God of Love Hangs Out,” and not just because some of its characters age dramatically. Ms. Bloom is as interested in the forces that rupture bonds as in the ones that, against all odds and sometimes at terrible risk, manage to create them. The subtle, stirring title story ably illustrates Ms. Bloom’s tremendous gift for imagining life as a series of choices, with the paths not taken as vivid as the ones that are.

People, couples and societies are complicated, and all too often, their complexity is flattened on the page. "Where the God of Love Hangs Out" is Amy Bloom's latest pop-up book for grown-ups, a stirring stand-up performance by a cast of 3-D characters rendered in sexy, loving, living color.

"Where the God of Love Hangs Out" is not a collection of love stories. It's short fiction that raises all the messy questions surrounding affairs of the heart: Why him? Why her? Why now? Why not? Bloom's true mastery comes through her well-drawn characters who stumble through telling scenes as they fall in and out of love. Her playful language blends with her innate sense of psychology to create deeply affecting prose.