Customer Reviews

Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker

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When I think of love stories, I tend to think of something that touches the soul. While these stories were good and well compiled, they didn't touch me in any way--with the exception of "In the Gloaming". These stories appealed to me becuase they didn't focus on other conventional love stories. They were about friends, siblings, people having affairs. This book strived hard to discover love in more places than just the two newly weds. But did throw confusion and boredom in with this discovery.

This is a really excellent book and should please anyone who likes short story collections and especially fiction from The New Yorker. Although I quibbled with the inclusion of certain stories and didn't like every one, it's hard for me to imagine a much better, broader, or satisfying range of stories on love than the one displayed in this volume. The book mixes many respected and famous authors with less established, newer ones, and I honestly can't say that the stories by either set of authors are better than the others.

My three favorite stories were Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic "Eyes of a Blue Dog," John Cheever's previously anthologized "Marito in Citta," and Alice Munro's recent "The Jack Randa Hotel." Each of these stories, like most of the best stories in this book, works so well because it conveys the intensity and idealism and adventure of love but is also grounded in the concrete, mundane details of everyday life. Other standouts include Alice Elliott Dark's recent but already classic "In the Gloaming," Katherine Keiny's charming, Jane Austenish "How to Give the Wrong Impression," R. Prawer Jhabvala's culture-clashing "The Man with the Dog," Bobbie Ann Mason's hilarious and moving "Love Life," John O'Hara's piercing "How Old, How Young," Raymond Carver's Edgar Allan Poe-imitating "Blackbird Pie," and Mary Grimm's probing "We."

As the editor, Roger Angell, and other reviewers here have noted, the book is not all full of happy endings and is not even always about passionate love affairs per se, but the broad theme of love is the perfect motif to carry along a short fiction anthology, and this theme keeps you moving through the stories just as love in real life keeps you moving through the everyday ups and downs of being with a romantic partner. One of the best short story anthologies I've read in a while.

Read this with my book club and NONE of us liked it. We expected a few more selections that were at least somewhat romantic. There was only one story that all of us really liked. We were disappointed.

i bought this book for a particular story that i had heard one evening on selected shorts on npr. the name of the story was "how to give the wrong impression" by katherine heiny. it's a cute quirky little story. having been read aloud to me it was enough for me to buy the book and read the rest of the stories contained within by the other authors. i enjoyed woody allen's contribution. i never knew he wrote short stories....lol. there were a few favorites and others that linger on the edge of your mind for awhile. it's definitely worth picking up and looking at. there is certainly a story within to suit almost any taste in romance. i wish it were that easy in finding romance in real life.

The choice of stories for this compilation ran the gamut of writing styles and styles of love. My only concern was how many (maybe 2/3!) dealt with infidelity. I suppose Tolstoy had it right when he wrote: 'All happy families are alike.....'

Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker ed. by Roger Angell. Not recommended.

Earlier in 2002, I had read Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology edited by Kate Flint, a wonderful, imaginative anthology that covers the gamut of love, from earnest and longing to the impulsive and painful, from gritty realism to the fantastic and the supernatural. I had had Nothing But You for a while, and it seemed natural to read it as a follow-up to the Victorian anthology. This proved to be a mistake; the contrast between the two highlights the shallowness of the New Yorker stories.

There are a few gems, such as "Marito in Città" by John Cheever, "The Diver" by V. S. Pritchett, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic surrealism, "The Kugelmass Episode" with Woody Allen's characteristic offbeat humour and angst, and "Here Come the Maples" with a touch of irony by John Updike. One story by a lesser-known writer, "In the Gloaming" by Alice Elliott Dark, stands out for beautifully conveying the tragedy of loss and alienation, not through death, but through the chains and barriers that life erects to prevent insight and truer love between the mother and son and between them and the distant, unloving father. Impending death finally begins to break down those barriers and reveal the humanity of mother and son to one another.

For the most part, however, these highlights are overwhelmed by the blandness of the rest of the selections. Somehow, this collection about "love" seems to miss many of love's elements-affection, depth of feeling, passion (depth of emotion of any kind), perception, dedication. Instead, many of the stories read as pointless, plodding, surface tellings of things that happen, with an amazing attention to mundane and unrelated detail, and revolve around featureless, interchangeable characters with no depth and no interest. "The Nice Restaurant" by Mary Gaitskill, with its generic yuppie characters Evan and Laurel, their meaningless relationship, and endless detail such as "Evan picked at his pork-chop bone. He downed his glass of wine" and "Laurel shifted in her chair" that is meant to convey the flat emotions of these flat people contrasts badly with the underlying passions and conflicts subtly portrayed in Lucy Clifford's "The End of Her Journey" and Hubert Crackenthorpe's "A Conflict of Egoisms" from the Victorian anthology. Later, the same cardboard characters, with different names, will appear in "Ocean Avenue" by Michael Chabon, where, nine yawning pages of yuppie angst over coffee later, the predictable happens.

How modern authors have reduced one of humanity's deepest, most elemental, and disturbing emotions into a painfully superficial detailing of everyday functions is, perhaps, a reflection of modern love and life. I would like not to think so, however. I would like to think that we are still capable of passion, even cartoon characters like Evan and Laurel and Chabon's California counterparts, Lazar and Suzette.

At the end of the Victorian collection, I felt elated, disturbed, empathic, inspired, and despairing. At the end of the New Yorker collection, I felt nothing but bored.

Diane L. Schirf, 3 November 2002.

These stories are nearly all wonderful, some are brilliant, and most are unavailable in other anthologies. I picked up the volume to read "We" by Mary Grimm -- well worth the find -- and then I read the collection. Many I remembered from their appearance in the magazine, like Julian Barnes's "Experiment", a dear lost friend. Others were entirely new, like the hysterically "on" Chabon and "Sculpture 1" by Angela Patrinos. Carver's "Blackbird Pie" might be the very best of all.

I've been spending the past few months thinking about that "love"-thing. And this book seemed so appropriate I 1-clicked (TM) it. So far, it's been serving it's duty. The fiction is, of course, excellent: it's the New Yorker. But the take on that "love"-thing that Roger Angell has chosen to assume for the magazine is most definitely intriguing. There is quite an emphasis on the true "love" found in affairs, that marriage contains none, only some sort of "duty," that love be of the impassioned and impulsive nature that only those of a poet's constitution could afford.

So, basically, it did make me feel like crap; but what a read.

The New Yorker publishes great writers, and great writers are worth reading. This collection, by focusing on a single theme, shows us familiar names often writing on an unfamiliar topic (love), which is always intriguing if occasionally disappointing. The quality of the stories varies but is usually quite high.

If you care about someone who reads the New Yorker, this is the perfect gift. These clever short stories explore the topic of romantic love. This collection will introduce you writers you may never have read before. Great variety: tongue in cheek, serious, witty, quirky, mysterious... The collection explores the many dimensions of love.