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My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
#UB9602
Hardcover, 587 pages; 2008
$19.96
It is perhaps only in reading a love story…that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer.
These are not cheerful tales of carefree romance and blissful marriages. Rather, editor Jeffrey Eugenides has compiled great love stories from the past 120 years that describe imperfect couplings, obstacle-laden courtships, delusional infatuations, and sexual complications—the descriptions of which are often quite explicit. Most of all, each of these twenty-six pieces from such masters of short fiction as Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, and Grace Paley emphasizes the ephemeral nature of love. As Eugenides puts it, "if it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does." This literary collection is entertaining, thought-provoking, heartbreaking, and compellingly readable. (In case you're curious, the title references a series of Catullus poems in which he attributes his lover's inattentiveness to her pet sparrow.)
(AG)
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