'Eugenides offers a perfect Valentine's Day gift for lovers a literary fiction... One of the best anthologies of recent years, as well as commanding proof that its editor is as expert a reader as he is a novelist.' Kirkus Reviews (starred)

'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 of 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