My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides

“Cupid is rarely kind in “Sparrow,” but his arrows are always razor-sharp.”-San Antonio Express-News

By focusing on literary merit, Eugenides has produced a treasury worth holding dear.”-Christian Science Monitor “The wonder of 'My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead' is that it manages to capture a deep as well as broad range of this funny thing called love. “The 27 short stories in this collection provide healthy doses of longing and disappointment, but reading them is thoroughly enjoyable, like diving into a box of fine chocolates and savoring the bitter along with the sweet.the book makes a great Valentine's Day gift for spouses, friends or lovers.”-Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers Eugenides has chosen splendid work.”-Washington Post Book World And it is a bigger thrill to realize that however painful the heartbreak, love offers real rewards-and these stories are among them.”-Los Angeles Times 'I'm a father and a husband, and I find that as life goes on, the kind of youthful romanticism changes into a deeper kind of, familial romanticism that is not really something so often written about in these kinds of stories,' he says.“The mix chosen by Eugenides is wonderful. '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. 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.

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides