Recent studies suggest that reading literature may make us smarter and more empathic, even more civic-minded. But what can literature tell us about love? Writers in a variety of genres share the books that taught them about love — and a few that led them memorably astray.

HILARY MANTEL: From Chamfort, the revolutionary aphorist, I learned that love is “nothing more than the exchange of two fantasies and the superficial contact of two bodies.” From Dorothy Parker, that “love is a thing that can never go wrong; / And I am Marie of Roumania.” From Thomas Hardy, that it is dangerous and may hang you. From Thomas Wyatt, to use the word seldom or keep it off the page. Numerous authors have taught me that it comes expensive, and the bill is sent in when the article is worn out: “Flames for a year, ashes for 30,” Lampedusa says. All this reading has made me notice that what is done in the name of love often looks like subtle and misdirected revenge. But from Virgil I have learned it beats all. “Omnia vincit Amor,” he claims, and it really does.

Hilary Mantel’s most recent novel is “Bring Up the Bodies,” winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize.

GARY SHTEYNGART: I read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” as a 9-year-old and fell in love for the first time. Her name was Becky Thatcher. She was the judge’s daughter, so prim, aristocratic and cute. Tom Sawyer may have first worshiped her “with furtive eye,” but I fell unabashedly in love with the American princess when I saw an illustration of her in a “white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes” throwing a pansy into the air. Only it wasn’t a pansy Becky was throwing, it was a flower called “anyutini glazki,” because I was reading a yellowing Soviet edition my family had brought over from Leningrad. As a young immigrant, I could hardly handle Twain in the original English. The journey to writing about love would first entail falling in love with a language that was not my own. But in whatever language, the image of a girl throwing a flower in the air as a besotted boy looked on, the feeling of budding but frustrated desire, stayed with me and became one of the themes of my fiction. My kingdom for a pansy.

Gary Shteyngart’s most recent book is “Little Failure: A Memoir.”

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: I remember visiting my father and stepmother one summer and pulling from a shelf a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping.” I found its margins full of annotations, and as I began to read I realized they were in two different hands and made up a conversation between my father and stepmother. They’d been reading the book, perhaps sharing it over some period of time, and responding not only to the story but also to each other. It was the kind of thoughtful conversation you have with someone who loves books as much as you do, who will argue about them, who will underline elegant sentences to make you take note of them again and again. At 19, I thought this was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. I began to understand that love wasn’t just the deeply passionate and troubled relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy in “Wuthering Heights” — a book I’d loved since I was a child. I began to understand that literature is love — a way to connect with others not only across time and space but also in the here and now. Literature teaches us to understand, in the most intimate way, the experiences and interior lives of others — which, of course, reveals us to ourselves. As Robert Penn Warren wrote, “What is love? / One name for it is knowledge.”