My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides

'I was terribly romantic as a youth, and I think I retain a portion of that romanticism. The novelist says he considers himself 'too old' to be a romantic anymore. the force of the desire drives the prose, drives the plot,' he says. 'When I think about a lot of my favorite novels - Portrait of a Lady by Henry James or Lolita by Nabokov, they are all love stories. Vulnerability and the heightened awareness that people feel when they're in love are what draw readers to love stories. The stories in this collection are by no means tragic, but in order to even get to a measure of happiness, the characters usually have to go through a lot of difficulty,' Eugenides says.Įugenides explains that the title of the collection comes from the Latin poet Catullus, who wrote poems about his desire for his girlfriend Lesbia - and the pet sparrow that keeps getting in the way.Įven when the sparrow dies, Eugenides says, Catullus is still thwarted: Lesbia is too grief-stricken by the death to pay any attention to the poet.Įugenides says he realized that these poems expressed the 'two poles' around which the love stories in the anthology revolve: voyeuristic longing and disenchanted entanglement.

'I started to realize that not only the love stories that I liked, but actually the love stories that everybody liked, had a certain bittersweet quality to them. He points out that love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births, on dysfunctional families and matrimonial boredom - and, in short, they simply give love a bad name. Edited and introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘Middlesex’, this wonderfully heterodox look at love will include, amongst others, ‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner, ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ by Anton Chekhov and stories by Lorrie Moore, Milan Kundera and Guy de Maupassant.Writer Jeffrey Eugenides, who edited the new anthology, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, takes a unique look at love through this short story collection. Read more on the theme of love, from Catullus to Alice Munro. This beautifully produced collection of short stories will combine the best of contemporary and classic fiction.

From passionate declarations to clinical analysis, writers of every age have been fascinated, tormented and inspired by love. No other aspect of the human experience regularly inspires such an outpouring of poetry, prose and philosophy as love. A wide-ranging and eclectic collection of short stories on the theme of love in its various forms: romantic, erotic, impossible, undying and exhausted. Description for My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro Paperback.

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides