Housing Works: Housing Prevents AIDS. Housing Improves Health.

From Junot Diaz, Lynda Barry, Gary Shteyngart, and Kate Christensen to popular up-and-comers like Dan Kennedy, Wendy McClure,_ Love Is a Four-Letter Word_ is a contemporary collection of true stories of seduction, heartbreak, and regret. Fearlessly revealing their shattered hearts and crushed egos; their indiscretions and indignities; their delusions, desperation, and disappointments, these talented writers capture the dark side of love in prose ranging from comic to poetic, poignant to cringe-inducing.

DAN KENNEDY is the author of the national best seller Rock On: An Office Power Balladand Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation,a regular contributor at GQ, and a long-standing writer at McSweeneys.net. He resides in New York City where he frequently performs onstage as part of the Moth storytelling collective. He is currently writing and developing the pilot of Rock On for HBO.

WENDY MCCLURE is a columnist for BUST magazine and was a frequent contributor to the “True-Life Tales” feature in the New York Times Magazine. She is the author of the memoir I’m Not the New Me and the humor book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan,and her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Sleepaway: Writings on Summer Camp. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and lives in Chicago, where she works as a children’s book editor and maintains a Weblog at Poundy.com.

MAUD NEWTON is a writer and blogger who grew up in Miami and now lives in a section of Brooklyn, New York, that has avoided gentrification into a hipster wonderland. Her essay, “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” won second prize in the 2008StoryQuarterly/Narrative Love Story Contest. Her essays and stories have also appeared inSwink, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, storySouth, Eyeshot, Maisonneuve, Pindeldyboz, Ducts, and the anthology When I Was a Loser, and she has written for the New York Times Book Review, the American Prospect, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Gawker, VH1’s Best Week Ever blog, and other publications and Web sites, including her own. In 2004 the City College of New York chose her as the recipient of its Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Award.

SAÏD SAYRAFIEZADEH is the author of When Skateboards Will Be Free, a memoir about growing up communist in the United States. His essays and short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, and Open City, among others.

AMANDA STERN is the author of the novel The Long Haul. Her nonfiction has been featured in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the East Hampton Star,the Believer, and Paste. She’s published fiction in the literary journals Swink, the Saint Ann’s Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Spinning Jenny, and Five Chapters, among other places. In 2003 she created the popular Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on her second novel.