These variously entertaining and insightful statements are never one-offs, but instead always in service of well-paced and affecting storytelling. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

One of his girlfriends is so sensitive, she “takes to hurt the way water takes to paper” his mother “wasn’t the effusive type … had one of those event-horizon personalities - s–t just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it” Yunior’s just as confident that the illegal immigrant with a crush on his brother Rafa is actually interested in “getting pregnant with citizen sperm” as he is that “trying to defend Boston from uncool is like blocking a bullet with a slice of bread.”

I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.” The nine stories that follow effectively test Yunior’s theory of himself, in either romantic situations or family dilemmas, though more often than not his acute focus is on the people and places around him. I know how that sounds - defensive, unscrupulous - but it’s true. It’s all there, straight up, in the book’s eye-rolling opening: “I’m not a bad guy.

Most immediately, as its title suggests, this new collection is about heartbreak and its causes, which have much to do with Yunior’s voracious, egotistical approach to love: He is a diehard romantic and a serial philanderer, an ardent lover and a walking talking sex gland, a sweet guy and a selfish jerk, a starry-eyed fool and a fast, blunt player. Article content Illustration by Andrew Barr

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