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My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

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My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Eugenides (Editor)

4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: HarperPerennial (5 Jan 2009)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0007291108
ISBN-13: 978-0007291106
Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 3.8 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 63,448 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#4 in Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > E > Eugenides, Jeffrey

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Product Description

Review

'[A] brilliant collection of love stories!An absolute must-read.' Harper's Bazaar, Editor's picks of the month 'Better than a bunch of flowers, if not so sweet.' Metro 'Eugenides has written a marvellous little essay on the love story to introduce his choices! an outstanding collection.' Joanna Trollope, The Times '[Eugenides's] artful arrangement of the stories adds to their pleasure. The collection is full of intriguing echoes that complement...one's responses.' Sunday Telegraph 'There are plenty of stories here which any lover of good writing -- if not perhaps every lover -- will enjoy.' Scotsman 'Pick up this beautiful new edition!a well-chosen collection of love stories edited by Pulitzer prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides.' Daily Mail 'A wonderful anthology of short stories.' Red magazine 'The mix chosen by Eugenides is wonderful!The plots are wildly different; the range in tone, form and style is immense. This brings unexpected delights!And it is a bigger thrill to realize that however painful the heartbreak, love offers real rewards -- and these stories are among them.' LA Times 'Gloriously wide-ranging!A beautifully produced collection.' Irish Independent 'There are 26 stories here and no one filler -- probably the most scintillating company anyone could take to bed with them on February 14.' Image magazine 'What is superb about this particular selection is the quality of the stories!To electrifying effect the writers here treat [love] with the honour, fear, and tenderness it deserves.' Glasgow Herald 'Jeffrey Eugenides is to be applauded for including in this collection of "Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro" some of the very finest writing.' Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday

Product Description

A wide-ranging and eclectic collection of short stories on the theme of love in its various forms: romantic, erotic, impossible, undying and exhausted. No other aspect of the human experience regularly inspires such an outpouring of poetry, prose and philosophy as love. From passionate declarations to clinical analysis, writers of every age have been fascinated, tormented and inspired by love. This beautifully produced collection of short stories will combine the best of contemporary and classic fiction on the theme of love, from Catullus to Alice Munro. 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.

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	90% buy the item featured on this page: My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro 4.7 out of 5 stars (3) �6.97
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	1% buy No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories 4.2 out of 5 stars (9) �4.77

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem of a book, 23 Jan 2009

By	Tartan girl (Perth, Scotland) - See all my reviews

I was blown away by the stories in this book, not only because the quality of the writing was so high but because of the variety of story offered. There are stories you will probably have come across before like Chekhov's 'The Lady with the Little Dog' but there are also more unusual ones by great writers like Nabokov's 'Spring in Fialta'. There are traditional, modern and post-modern stories, short and long stories, some of them very moving, and they reveal so many different kinds of love. In his introduction Jeffrey Eugenides makes an interesting distinction between love as a subject and the love story. He offers this fat book of stories, he says, as a "cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery." He suggests reading them "in the safety of your single bed" and letting "everybody else suffer". Me, I suffered with the people in the stories. All great stuff!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastically unorthodox collection of love stories, 2 Mar 2009

By	Gabrielle O (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro (Paperback)

Quirky and wonderfully varied, these 'love stories' are about every possible aspect of love, not just love in a romantic, soppy sense - although there is that too. A range of stories from all range of eras, from very different writers. All beautifully chosen. The stories are carefully arranged, with some themes echoing throughout the book.

'A love story can never be about full possession,' says Eugenides. 'The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims - these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories.' That should give you an idea of how he's gone about compiling this fantastic collection.

This is very much NOT a 'happily ever after' book - beware if you plan to make a romantic gift of this! (Although personally I would be delighted to be given this, it isn't strictly romantic, I suspect.) Instead, it's a reflection on love and the human condition in all its varied, sometimes odd glory. Manages to fit in everything from adultery and loss to silly, giggly young love and lasting marriage - and other things in between.

From the classic to the contemporary, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead is full of wonderful stories - Raymond Carver, Chekhov, Eileen Change and many more. Not exactly love stories, but stories that will make you laugh, cry, wonder and think about love...

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4.0 out of 5 stars A phenomenally moving and wide-ranging collection, 29 Aug 2009

By	purplepadma (London) - See all my reviews

I purchased this some time ago, and it's been waiting patiently on my bookshelves before being tossed into my suitcase as a last minute back-up holiday read. Upon starting it, I cursed myself for ignoring it for so long, because right from the opener (Harold Brodkey's "First Love and Other Sorrows") this collection is short-story writing at its best. As Jeffrey Eugenides explains in his introduction, he has not selected stories where the lovers are instantly fulfilled and live happily ever after. In his view, "the happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims - these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories ... love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name." Here, then, we see love as suffering, love as missed opportunity, as a beautiful dream which can never be played out, due to the impossible circumstances of real life. Eugenides has chosen teenages unable to consummate their lust, and placed them next to middle-aged marrieds unable to afford divorce, a lodgers who becomes smitten with his landlord's wife, and a husband who loses his wife's love to Alzheimer's disease.

My personal favourites were Deborah Eisenburg's "Some Other, Better Otto" and Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" - Eugenides calls these the bleakest of the collection (although to my mind Denis Johnson's "Dirty Wedding" and David Gates' "The Bad Thing" are far bleaker, far harder to reconcile with my own understanding of the term "love.") George Saunder's "Jon" I had come across before, but re-read and with great admiration. I have to confess to abandoning both Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta" and Robert Musil's "Tonka"; perhaps I just couldn't cope with shift in style. My lack of enjoyment of these stories is my only reason for rating this collection as a four-star read; but the remaineder I found though-provoking, often exquisitely written, and sometimes profoundly moving.

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