In her introduction to Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, editor Daphne Gottlieb writes, “After the call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset e-mails. Over and over, they said: You’re not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this question would not be asked of the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance.” Why this might not be so, Gottlieb explains herself: “But mothers, the ill, and dancers, do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform.”

Lying, of course, is at the heart of adultery. Some of the stories in the anthology make the point that lying, indeed, is what it’s all about: the relationship wasn’t all that great, the sex unspectacular, but the deception gave the whole thing a special thrill, a charge that was greater, at times, than love and desire themselves. With lying, though, comes a whole host of complications and the attendant affective vacillations and negotiations that have always made adultery such ripe territory for literary exploration. While these complications may also produce a combination of guilt and defiance that can hamper an author (a few of the stories in the collection feel like fictionalized justifications of real-life adulteries, with the kind of moral accounting that is best left to the diary and the therapist’s office), most of the stories and poems in the collection manage to turn adultery inside out and trace in novel ways the slippery slopes of its emotional terrain.

Sometimes this is accomplished through defamiliarization. Boy meets girl, boy cheats on girl (or the other way around) is an old and tired story. But boy meets girl who beats and loves him, and they both cheat on each other (Stephen Elliott’s “The Other Man”) bears another telling. Ditto Jonathan Harper’s tale of after-hours closeted sex – literally and figuratively – in a chain bookstore. These stories don’t just make good reading for their voyeuristic elements – though there is that – but because they show us new ways of answering these essential questions: what is love? why do we seek to destroy it? how do we salvage it?

Indeed, many of the stories and poems take us through new or unexpected territory. Lenelle Moise’s story “Cuck(h)olding a Stranger” confronts the judgment of passersby and its oddly piercing sting, while Felicia Sullivan’s “The Business of Leaving” deftly illustrates the impact of adultery on the children. Gina Frangello’s story, the longest in the collection, surveys the wreckage of a Catholic girlhood. Adultery is the least of her character’s problems but it brings the other elements – suicide, stalking, relentless honesty – into sharp focus. Kevin Sampsell’s “Homewreckers” has a delightfully wry tone and makes poignant the absurdities of the stories we tell, while Christine Hamm’s hilarious poem “Animal Husbandry” takes adultery to a whole new level. Scott Pomfret’s “Chicken” goes perhaps the deepest into the thrill and despair of the illicit, tracking the most subtle shifts in longing with devastating precision.

Susannah Breslin’s beautiful “Belonging Impossible, Longing All There Is” closes out the collection. The story is composed of one single paragraph that courses over three and a half pages. With deceptively simple language (“The relationship between the husband and the wife was in a bad state. The husband had cheated on the wife. Now, there were a great many walls between them.”) she strips back the obfuscation and equivocation to reveal what is implicit throughout the book: the stakes of an affair. Here then is the heart of the matter. Adultery thrills because it has the power to hurt the ones we love. In the end Breslin offers her characters a silvery sliver of redemption: they are wiser, sadder, and clinging to each other. In all its strange loveliness the story exemplifies the collection’s strongest attributes: its lack of sentimentality and its enormous heart.