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

~ Jeffrey Eugenides (Editor)
Key Phrases: drummer boy, lady with the little dog, magic barrel, Mary Jane, Miss Emily, White Rose (more...)

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Book Description

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . .

It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."—Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

A Q&A with Jeffrey Eugenides

The author of bestsellers The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides talks about his turn as editor of My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, with Andrea Hoag, a book critic in Lawrence, Kansas, whose reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Film Comment, and Kirkus Reviews.

Q: What was the process of elimination like? Can you discuss which stories you decided to leave out?

A: The story I miss most is "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I picked it, but we weren't able to the secure the rights to reprint it, even though the anthology supports a charitable cause. The UK edition lacks James Joyce's "The Dead" for similar reasons. (Happily, "The Dead" is in public domain in the U.S.) The first thing you confront when you compile an anthology like this, however, is the painful obligation to exclude wonderful work. Lots and lots of it. The only way I could sleep at night was to remind myself it was all for a good cause. How did I choose? The way people choose their mates: for intelligence, beauty, humor, and a sense that they'll be around for the long haul.

Q: You say in your introduction that "sober middle-age had made me less susceptible to [Nabokov’s] lush lyricism." In a way, editing this collection brought you back into the proverbial fold where he was concerned. Why do you feel that he is "much better…than everybody else…"?

A: In all honesty, I was never out of the fold. Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers. He's able to juggle ten balls where most people can juggle three or four. "Spring in Fialta" works on so many levels: as an affecting tale of thwarted love; a reinactment of the literary process by which we fall victim to, and memorialize, our loves; and a philosophical rumination on time and fate. The sentences are perfect, the emotion deep, the intellectual scintillation nearly blinding. Pure bliss, in other words.

Q: I’ve been building up an imaginary shrine in my home dedicated to the cult of Lorrie Moore and I almost wept when I read the line from "How to Be An Other Woman" that goes… "he laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh...." I truly believe that. Don’t you think most people--smart, thinking people--would do just about anything for someone with a nice laugh?

A: I'm glad you like the Lorrie Moore Story. Lorrie herself doesn't. She wrote it when she was twenty-four, and neither my own appreciation of the story, nor my assurances that many people insisted I include it, were enough to dissuade her from detesting her own "immature" work. This is a sign of a great writer, by the way. But "How to be An Other Woman" remains a great story. In addition, since a lot of the stories in the anthology share a traditional narrative structure, the Moore story comes as a nice shift in tone and strategy. I was conscious of that, too, in putting the book together, the DJ aspect of the whole thing, moving from fast numbers to slow dances and back again.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the charity the proceeds for this book will go to?

A: 826CHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Their services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. 826CHI provides after-school tutoring, class field trips to our location, writing workshops, and in-schools programs--all free of charge--for students, classes, and schools in Chicago. All of the programs are challenging and enjoyable, and ultimately strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice. Driving the mission home are more than 500 volunteers--the professional writers, teachers and artists, to name a few, who staff each and every program enables 826 CHI to serve 5,000 students annually with a small, efficient staff of four and an operating budget of about $282,550.

Product Description

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name . . . .

It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer."—Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead

All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Harper (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061240370
• ISBN-13: 978-0061240379
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #231,494 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eugenides says "the perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives.", January 28, 2008

By	love books and music (usa) - See all my reviews

Jeffrey Eugenides titled this book from a Latin poet, Catullus (84 BC), who wrote a poem which includes the title line in translation. It's a foreshadowing of the themes of the collected stories within, themes involving the bittersweet, well that's an understatement, aspects of love. Love affairs are often just that -- affairs. Eugenides remarks that Catullus' poems "speak to the stories in this collection that burn, dazzle, delight or sadden, depending."

This anthology of 26 short stories by authors such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Guy de Maupassant, Mary Robison, Eileen Chang, and Alice Munro among others is carefully edited by Eugenides. He has undertaken this project for charitable proceeds; indeed, all proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth-writing programs offered by 826 Chicago, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 - 18 with their creative and expository writing skills and to help teachers inspire their students to write.

A passage in the introduction hints at a possible reason Eugenides felt compelled to put this collection together:

"...I can still hear our Latin teacher, Miss Ferguson, piping out in her most piercing sparrow's voice, "passer pipiabat," getting us to notice how much the plosive rhythm resembled a bird singing. That words were music, that, at the same time they were marks on a page, they also referred to things in the world and, in skilled hands, took on properties of the things they denoted, was for me, at fifteen, an exciting discovery, all the more notable for the fact that this poetic effect had been devised by a young man dead for two thousand years, who'd sent this phrase drifting down the centuries to reach me in my Michigan classroom, filling my American ears with the sound of Roman birdsong..."

The reader is treated to a loose translation of "passer pipiabat" by Eugenides -- "Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all."

I recommend this collection with the notice that one not expect happily-ever-afters. It can be disturbing, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking. For instance, the first two I read, one by Grace Paley and one by Lorrie Moore, were somber and vaguely depressing.

Another plus: all of the contributors have a short bio in the appendix. The cover art is amazing and creative.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is a Win-Win Proposition!, February 4, 2008

By	Mary Lins (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you purchase "My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead" you not only obtain a wonderfully entertaining yet complex anthology of "love" stories, you also contribute to a worthy charity that supports budding writers. Win-Win!

I picked up this anthology expecting to just dip in and out of it, but the selections are so engrossing and lively that I was instantly mesmerized.

Another reviewer has wisely pointed out that these aren't all "happily ever after" love stories - far from it. They are BETTER than anything trite and saccharine.

Best yet, these classics can be read over and over. Bravo Jeffrey!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Just "okay", June 19, 2008

By	citygal - See all my reviews

I got this book from my public library, and have read several of the stories so far. I had already read most of the classics (e.g., "A Rose for Emily," "Lady with the Pet Dog," etc.), so I've been reading the others. I haven't found one so far that I've liked. Based on the preface, I understand that this is not a "happily-ever-after" type collection, and I'm fine with that. But some of these stories paint such a cynical picture of human beings that it seems almost perverse. I mean, in one of the stories, the protagonist is a pot-smoking, drug-dealing teen who masturbates in the basement and then starts having sex regularly with his 14-year old cousin (who, by the way, used to make porn movies for money and thought nothing of it). I'm sorry, but I'd like to be able to identify with SOME aspect of the hero and heroine, and in many of the stories so far, I just can't.

If you want a REALLY excellent collection of short stories that will hold your attention without making you feel as if humankind totally sucks, try Tobias Wolfe's new collection entitled Our Story Begins.