When Laurel, a young college student, is brutally attacked while riding her bike, she withdraws from her life into a job at a homeless shelter. But when resident Bobbie Crocker dies, she discovers a box of his photos that prove he was a famed photographer of legendary talents—including a shot of her hours before her assault. So begins a dangerous obsession; the deeper Laurel searches for answers to Bobbie's life, the more her own hangs in the balance. Interwoven with the world of The Great Gatsby, with cameos from Daisy and Tom Buchanan's daughter and Gatsby himself, this is a shattering haunter about the stories we need to tell to save ourselves from the ones that really happened.

Nothing is more perfect than a love poem. For those of you who might be romantically challenged, this nifty edition of amorous poems lets the voices of others be your own personal Cyrano de Bergerac. Ranging from the silly to the sublime, the wonderful collection includes amorous poetry from the likes of Lewis Carroll, John Donne, John Updike, Marge Piercy, and William Shakespeare. Hip in tone and adventurous in selection, the book is organized into sections such as "Hello, I Love You" and "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" Best of all, Rubin includes sidebars illuminating the meaning and history of each poem, as well as ways to read it aloud. All more than enough reason to forget the bonbons this year and instead go with these bons mots.

Every Sunday, I eagerly await my copy of The New York Times so I can read the Modern Love column. Edited by Daniel Jones (The Bastard on the Couch), this is a place where love junkies, bruised souls, and hopeless romantics lay bare the secrets of their hearts. From finding and keeping love to divorce, birth, and death, this collection of previously published columns runs the gamut from the controversial (loving your husband more than your kids) to the heartbreaking (struggling to fall in love with someone new while morning a deceased wife) to the hysterically funny (reading between the e-mail lines). Meant as a "literary time capsule of early-twenty-first-century love," as Daniel Jones says in the intro, Modern Love shows that love is strange, wonderful, horrible—and timeless.