Books

Three unlucky New Yorkers. Three shots at love and sanity. Not very smooth – and you wouldn’t want it any other way.

In the title story, Murray Resnick loses his job, his wife and very nearly his mind in the same unlucky year, and after some desperate attempts and fantasies is given to seek succour with his brother in Palm Beach, where more problems emerge.

In ‘Breakfast Special’, a shy, lovestruck novelist becomes consumed by a woman who passes his coffee-shop window each morning while his imagination gets dangerously ahead of the facts.

In ‘Park Avenue Story’, a hasty, failed marriage and a single glimpse of a girl on Park Avenue send a young Brooklyn-born playwright on a romantic fixation that detonates after they finally meet.

You Do to My Heart is Woody Allen at his most classic: three New York stories about brilliant, anxious men undone by love, memory and their own overactive minds. Funny, rueful and packed with the neurotic charm that has defined his films for half a century, this collection confirms that no one captures the particular heartbreak of loving in Manhattan quite like Woody Allen.