MVR 350
An anthology of literary love stories—in a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics edition—perfect for Valentine’s Day.
Here are nineteen stories from a rich array of writers. The objects of passion in these stories range from a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting “Dead Mabelle” and a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata’s “Immortality” to a heart surgeon in Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the despair of a husband and wife sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a couple brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff, and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Guy de Maupassant, Italo Calvino, and T. C. Boyle portray the elemental force of love in extremely different ways.
As alluring, moving, and intoxicating as its timeless theme, this collection makes an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life.
Published in 2009.
ISBN: 9780307270870
MVR 280
Drawing on history, literature, and his own experience of unrequited passion, Love is a thinly disguised picture of the author’s innermost feelings.
Stendahl’s obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski is at the heart of this book. For her part, she neither returned his love nor understood him. In an attempt to expain his feelings to her—and to exorcise his love—he dissects his passion.
Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal constructed a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.
Published in 1975.
ISBN: 9780140443073
MVR 350
It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul.
Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.
Published in 1993.
ISBN: 9780679429067