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

The 26 love stories in this anthology, from Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” to Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” are not happily-ever-after affairs. Instead, as Eugenides writes in the introduction, “Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.” Eugenides, a professor of creative writing at Prince-ton, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex.