Approaching someone you’re attracted to can make some people sweat compulsively. Others close up like a clam and become the creepy wierdo women talk about the next morning with their girlfriends, while some are too scared to even say hello. 

And so we retreat behind the screen thinking it would make this dating thing easier. But the digital realm is just as complex as it is face to face.

In The Hypothetical Girl, Elizabeth Cohen brilliantly weaves a collection of mistaken attraction, vanity at its worse, stalking, loneliness, and secret fetishes. It is anything but those cheesy I met my wife/husband/partner/lover online fairytales (although there are some happy endings). It’s the stories that make us human in all our ugliness and beauty.

Lee Bacon is standing on the platform waiting for a late train in Munich. This is unusual, as trains in Germany are known for being impeccably punctual.

While waiting, Bacon thinks of the opening for his first children’s book, “Our class got out of sixth period early the day my parents tried to flood the earth.”

Coincidentally, Joshua Dread (Delacorte Press, 2012), the story of a 12-year-old boy who discovers his parents are villains and he also has superpowers, is now being translated into German. The book will also be published in Australia, France, Israel, and New Zealand.

“I was so focused on just getting my book published in America,” said Bacon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “That really feels like icing on the cake.”

My mother once told me that if I ever marry, make sure I have my own money. Nothing lasts forever and people always change, she warned. Such wisdom rings true in Lily Steps Out by Rita Plush.

When Lily Gold’s retired husband Leon has a heart attack, the 55-year-old Jewish mother is shaken with the reality that she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if he had died. A dutiful wife of more than thirty years with a successful son, Lily wants a legacy of her own, outside of the home.