The Hypothetical Girl

by Elizabeth Cohen

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Love meets technology with a dash of quirk in this collection of highly original short stories
 
An aspiring actress meets an Icelandic Yak farmer on a matchmaking Web site. An online forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle for an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and an elementary school teacher living in Japan. A deer and a polar bear flirt via Skype. In The Hypothetical Girl a menagerie of characters graze and jockey, play and hook up in the online dating world with mixed and sometimes dark results. Flirting and communicating in chat rooms, through texts, e-mails, and IMs, they grope their way through a virtual maze of potential mates, falling in and out of what they think and hope may be true love.
 
With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird. The Hypothetical Girl captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection.

Release date: August 6, 2013

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

From "Love, Really"

   You want to believe in a future with the man. But the future is cloudy, like the lake that extends from your head now when you sleep is cloudy. You want to believe that love is strong. You want to believe. This is the part where you say you want to fix it, this thing of you. “Fix what?” he asks. “Nothing is broken.” You realize that you and the man are having completely different experiences. You and he are not in the same love affair but in two separate ones. It is a mere coincidence that they happen to be with each other. 
   This is the part where you go back online to the romance website and see that the man has been very active there, in the time since you have met. This is the part where the place under your ribs sighs. This is the part where you cry. This is the part where you try to teach your mouth how to say it. How to say goodbye to a man who is a country where you wanted to emigrate. A man whose face was so familiar. 
   This is the part where you realize: It is what it is. 
   This is the part where you realize you will, in fact, take. One. Day. At. A. Time.