Maupassant, Calvino, Bowen: Love Stories

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. A tremendous array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of D. H. Lawrence and Colette to the wickedly cynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘That in Aleppo Once . . .’ to the yearning romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Winter Dreams’. Objects of passion include a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting ‘Dead Mabelle’, a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata’s ‘Immortality’, and in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ a heart surgeon who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it.