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.
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.
“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. 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.