In Love is a Pie, Maude Hutchins serves up what is surely one of the most extraordinary pastries ever baked in a literary oven. Its ingedients range from the small angel Astrolabe, to Toto the gorilla, from an impudently portrayed Julius Caeser to the newest wife of the founder of the Mormon church. There is the curious history of why mannequins do not speak. In a group of five stories—“The Lost Papers of an Extra Man”—one learns what goes on in a bachelor’s mind and heart, and at the dinner parties where he tends to lose both. In every piece within Love is a Pie there is the inimitable Hutchins style, her fresh and original way of looking at familiar matters, her piquant wit.