Book Alert / My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead -- Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro, Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, Harper '08, $24.95, 587 pages, ISBN #0061240370.

"A love story can never be about full possession...." writes Jeffrey Eugenides. "Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name....It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstacy 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."

Such is the lush introduction to a couple of dozen love stories -- some classics, some not -- most penned by writers you'll know: Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With The Little Dog," William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Vladimir Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta," Isaac Babel's "First Love," Richard Ford's "Fireworks," and Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel," among them.