The sun, the moon, the stars -- Nilda -- Alma -- Otravida, Otravez -- Flaca -- The pura principle -- Invierno -- Miss Lora -- The cheater's guide to love.

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

On a beach in Santo Domingo, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in This is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever."