Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. 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. In his Introduction, Jeffrey Eugenides provides the above definition for what he was looking for when he set out to collect his
Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. - Jeffrey EugenidesMy late grandmother was quite ill the last time I met her. She confused me with her stories as she mixed up my late grandfather with one of my uncle. I did not have a chance to know either of my grandfathers as they died when I was few months old. So the only way to know them was through my grandmother's stories about my grandfather or my father's about his father. I don't know if she had loved her husband, my grand...
In terms of style, well-written, but otherwise there isn't much to recommend these stories unless you like reading about fickle men who value women only as mysterious objects of desire. "It was grim that she existed and I had not had her" is a sentence from one of the stories which sums the whole collection quite nicely.Having read all the stories, I returned to the introduction and realized the whole unpleasant experience of reading them could have been avoided had I read the introduction more
Nowadays, any story about love is threaten to be a story about gender politics. It’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes, you just do not want politics, fight and feathers, you want a miracle which is love… This story collection gives you just that. It contains more than two dozen love stories ranging widely from Nabokov to Miranda July and from Faulkner to Alice Monroe. The stories were selected by Geoffrey Eugenides. The collection is introduced by his essay on the nature of a love story an...
It's ridiculously difficult for me to rate this book because there is such a vast difference between the stories that I relished and the ones that I had to trudge through. I adore Eugenides as an author, but his editing skills in regards to a collection of "great" love stories leaves something to be desired. There are certainly stories that, to me, expressed the epitome of love, such as Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," in which a husband begins to lose his wife of several decades to bo...
Has some stellar names, some classic stories. Have mixed feelings about the collection, but liked it overall. My favourite stories from the collection were Anton Chekhov's 'The Lady with the Little Dog', Guy de Maupassant's 'Mouche' and Mary Robison's 'Yours'. Longer review soon.
It's hard for me to give this book an overall rating. It is a bittersweet collection full of the certain ache that only love can stir. There were some familiar stories I had read before, but most were new to me and all were good, with one being especially great.These stories I had read before: Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Joyce's "The Dead," Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta," and Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." All are great stories w...
Mixed bag. Some of the selections are just obvious classics everyone's read: "A Rose for Emily," "The Dead," "The Lady with the Little Dog," for example. Others are by hugely famous authors like Kundera and Nabokov, but not nearly as frequently anthologized (as far as I know). Those two stories, "The Hitch-Hiking Game" and "Spring in Fialta" respectively are probably the two best stories here excepting "The Dead," which is so perfect it's hard to believe. The more contemporary stuff I thought wa...
How could this book not be good? I saw it in the bookstore and thought the design was so kick-ass- no book sleeve! We all hate those anyways. The design is ON the hard back. Good decision #1.#2- Jeffrey Eugenides edited it. I never finished Middlesex because I left it on a plane to Italy. But I was super enthralled during the first 80 pages. I also love the Virgin Suicides. Josh Hartnett, and Sophia Coppola.#3. The stories, so far, are incredible. And they're not all Dave Egger's-ish in approach...
Jeffrey Eugenides, the editor of this collection of short stories begins by saying: “I offer this book as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories not to confirm the brutal realities of love, but to experience its many variegated, compensatory pleasures.”He takes the title from the poetry of Catullus, who writes of his mistress’s pet sparrow as a rival for her attention. When the sparrow dies and fortune seems to be going his way, he is really no better off; h...
Opinions on the quality of the writing aside, the apparent definition of love by the compiler and the authors tells me more about them than I wish to know. Apart from a fraction of the stories, the stories have nothing to do with love and more to do with infatuation (if the reader is lucky), lust, narcissism, unadulterated selfishness, and a complete lack of awareness of the other person in their "relationship". Immaturity as a characteristic is a relief in these essentially unrelenting depressi...
I love short stories. And I love LOVE stories. So I bought this book prepared to be heartbroken and joyful and wallow in the genius of truly magnificent writing. After all the book promises these are the GREATEST love stories.Well I started reading. And eventually I slowed down. I wasn't looking forward to each story. I just wanted to finish the bloody book. Hardly any of the stories moved me. Did I have a heart of stone?I finally twigged what the problem was when I looked at the authors list at...
This is, overall, a well-curated collection of love-related stories, or as Jeffrey Eugenides dubs it (to paraphrase), "stories about when the sparrow is alive, and stories about when the sparrow is dead." While most of the pieces address dead sparrows, I had to skip a few on account of general (as well as birthday) (oh, as well as pre-V-day) malaise. I'm glad I was reminded of authors like Raymond Carver, whose unsettling "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" addresses moribund domestic l...
What an unusual collection of "love" stories! A few were along the lines of what is expected upon hearing the term "love story", but many of the contributions defied tradition in some respect. I especially enjoyed the entries by Chekhov, Moore, Dybek, de Maupassant, and Saunders. I was never a big fan of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, but The Lady With the Little Dog piqued my interest in reading more of his short stories. Dybek's We Didn't, though frustrating for the narrator, is thoroughly enjo...