My inappropriate nickname for A. L. Kennedy is “Dr. Strangelove.” Not because she’s a devious former Nazi played by Peter Sellers in a movie of the same name, but because her work is obsessed with love and strangeness and, in this particular case, with the strangeness of love. There’s also a strangeness in her writing — both her premises and her sentences — that makes it tricky to situate this prolific Scottish author in any particular literary context. She does things her fellow widely prized and widely translated peers do not: compose whole novels in the second person, write BBC dramas, perform stand-up comedy and ponder in prose the existence of such items as a chocolate-flavored condom, as she does in her new collection of stories, “All the Rage.”

The narrator’s thoughts on that condom begin with a sensible question (“You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both?”) and progress to a renunciation (“I don’t feel my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary”). The character declines to purchase the novelty contraceptive, moving on to other options as she browses a sex shop. The story is one of 12 in Kennedy’s 15th book, which focuses on tales of love: people deceived by it, people injured by it, people who inflict its injuries on others. Reading the stories out loud to a partner could make for a couple of spiky and salacious (if not particularly sex-conducive) afternoons.

The title story finds a couple at a train platform, wife guarding suitcases while husband wanders off to cruise female pedestrians and reflect on past liaisons. While his unsuspecting spouse waits, the husband mentally works through the logistics of cheating: “I washed thoroughly after them, extra soap and water for the hands, the betraying hands, and I used mouthwash and set aside a holdall of specifically adulterous clothing — like a gym bag. Salted money away for the costs. I suppressed my traces.” There’s more. He thinks back on obscure hotels, cellphones, the guilty penance of performing extra chores at home. This is pure Kennedy: cruelty, lust and methodology.

But also, wit. The wife finds out about the cheating, of course, and at the railway platform she faces her partner with an “expression suggesting that he was an unhealthy animal and ought to be destroyed.” (Oof.) In another story, a poor man is described as “naked except for faded and overly short denim shorts and with a balding ponytail, as if such a thing should be possible in a kind and proper world.” Sentences like this pop up often, and reading them feels like the verbal equivalent of being tickled while crying. In a different story, a couple idly fantasize about the man dying and the woman planning his funeral. She threatens to play Andrew Lloyd Webber; he says he’ll come back and haunt her if she does; she replies: That’s the point. A reader suspects that the author would be a great person with whom to people-watch.