How much jabber there is in the name of love! A best-selling author tops the list with a book interchangeable with the last. Spin the radio dial and try to distinguish one lyric from the next; channel surf and the images fly by with titillating commercials, identical plots, and a surfeit of slick passion with little joy. We live in a throw-away love culture where the very nature of the thing we hunger for most is served up to us packaged in Styrofoam like fast food.

Love is for sale everywhere; it keeps the cash registers ringing, the bottom line solidly in the black.

OK, so that's them. What about the rest of us? Do we seek happy endings or the beginnings of understanding? Who can voice for us the complexity of love in all its guises and illusions? Who will grapple with love's betrayals and losses and preposterous fantasies? Who will get us through the night? Over the past eight years, the stories collected in this volume were selected as among the outstanding from our literary writers and reprinted in the annual Pushcart Prize series.

In Love Stories For The Rest Of Us, they have been picked again, out of hundreds, because they speak of love, all kinds of love - and they are terrific. These tales did not spring from a commercial cookie cutter. They come from the experiences and imaginations of today's most talented writers. Consequently, the tales collected here are an unpredictable lot describing love as tragic, joyous, excruciating, ridiculous, crazy, blissful: in other words, all the emotions that the rest of us know love to be.

The rest of us, be we young, old, urban, suburban, black, white, oriental, Hispanic, rich, poor (or in between), married or single will find our hearts here. These writers are not the usual suspects. The love they speak of is told in unsentimental, often unsparing ways. Like love, these fictions will enthrall you, hurt you, enrich you and make you cry or laugh or pound the desk in outrage, but they will never bore.

We suspect that these fictions carry the voice of truth, and we also conjecture that truth is what the rest of us would like to enjoy.