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"The sex organs engorge, the skin tingles . . . the eyes dilate, the heart beats faster, the rate of breathing rises, and it is possible that the excited body also puts out aphrodisiac chemical odours." Congratulations! You're in love. At least according to biological theory, as described in Sheila Sullivan's indispensable guide Falling in Love: A History of Torment and Enchantment. But there's more to it than that – isn't there? "Love's limits are ample and great," writes the very ample and great Robert Burton, in An Anatomy of Melancholy, "and a spacious walk it hath." In Love Virtually and The Lover's Dictionary Daniel Glattauer and David Levithan give it another good outing.

It's been around the block a few times, of course – A Lover's Discourse; Antony and Cleopatra; The Art of Loving; As You Like It; Pride and Prejudice; The Allegory of Love; Love in the Western World; Love in the Time of Cholera; Bridget Jones's Diary; Dr Zhivago . . . You name it, we've read about it: falling in love; falling out of love; making love; forbidden love; love found; love lost; love aches; love pains; lovers' tiffs. So, how to write about a subject that everyone else has already written about, and everyone has already read about? It's a simple, practical question with a simple, practical answer. Make it new. Or newish.

Glattaeur writes his novel of love as an exchange of emails; Levithan writes his as a dictionary. Hardly bobby-dazzling: there are, obviously, numerous epistolary novels, and email novels, and postcard novels, and blog novels, and novels written as dictionaries, and abcedariums. But they remain unusual enough, or odd enough, as devices, or forms, to get the reader's attention – like gentians instead of roses on Valentine's Day.

In Love Virtually, Leo Leike and Emmi Rothner start corresponding by accident; one slight slip in an email address, and suddenly they're away. It's the beginning of a modern romance: "Dear Mrs Rothner, I'm so glad you've written back . . . And did you really Google me? How flattering!" They start off teasing – "I like your humour," writes Emmi, "it's only a semitone away from chronic seriousness." And then things start to develop. They tempt one another to guess what they look like. Writes Emmi: "It's driving me nuts that you're so sure you know what I look like! I think it's downright impertinent. One more question: when you gaze at your high-res fantasy image of me, do you at least like what you see?" Replies Leo, eight minutes later, "Like, like, like. Is that really so important?" Of course it is.

The mildly flirtatious becomes the less-than-mildly flirtatious – "I'm not looking for 'adventure' with you. I just want to see who you are. Just once I want to look my email buddy in the eye. If that's what you call 'cheating', then I admit that I might just be a cheat." Disaster looms. They start behaving like teenagers (they're not teenagers). "If there's anyone who isn't just anybody then it's you. Not to me, at any rate. You're like a second voice inside me, accompanying me through the day. You've turned my inner monologue into a dialogue. You enrich my emotional life. You question, insist, parody, you engage me in conflict." They become each other's world, where they say things like "you are my other world". The end is as unexpected as it is inevitable. The book is translated from the German, but the whole thing is tout à fait.

Levithan's novella-as-dictionary is American, and New Yorky. The nameless narrator writes about his relationship with his nameless girlfriend in a series of short chapters, or entries, beginning with "aberrant, adj." and ending with "zenith, n.". It could have been just Auster-lite. It is in fact delightfully slight.

Glattauer faced the challenge of creating two clear and distinct voices, one male, one female. Levithan's challenge is to flesh out the lexicographical structure with people, and a plot. Which takes some doing. And which doesn't always do it. The entry for "arduous, adj." reads, in its entirety, "Sometimes during sex, I wish there was a button on the small of your back that I could press and cause you to be done with it already". No one could argue with that: honest, true, ne'er so well expressed. But "ardent, adj." is too ardent even for ardent: "Sometimes desire is air; sometimes desire is liquid. And every now and then, when everything else is air and liquid, desire solidifies, and the body is the magnet that draws its weight." And "corrode, v." perhaps seems a little worn and effete: "I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open, and it started to rust."

Everything we know about intimacy, and excitement, and the urge to commitment, and the fear of commitment is writ painstakingly small in The Lover's Dictionary: A Novel (Fourth Estate, £12.99), which ultimately has the heft and shape and size not so much of a novel as of hundreds of tiny short stories. "Libidinous, adj. I never understood why anyone would have sex on the floor. Until I was with you and I realised: you don't ever realise you're on the floor." "Flagrant, adj. I would be standing right there, and you would walk out of the bathroom without putting the cap back on the toothpaste." Like life, in other words.

Ian Sansom's Mobile Library series is published by Fourth Estate.

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