The Literary Lover: Great Stories of Passion and Romance - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140171649 ISBN 13: 9780140171648

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1994

Synopsis

From pyrotechnic eroticism to fading passion, 20 contemporary writers explore love in this irresistible collection. Contributors include Harold Brodkey, Laurie Colwin, Nadine Gordimer, Rachel Ingalls, William Kotzwinkle, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, John Updike, and many others.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This fine collection brings together a diverse array of 20 contemporary stories about love and lust. Arranged in a chronology of sorts, these tales trace affairs of the heart from adolescent puppy love (Steven Millhauser's "The Sledding Party") to the worn and weathered ties of a begrudging elderly couple ("Letter to the Lady of the House" by Richard Bausch) and touch on many permutations in between. In David Leavitt's wrenching "Houses," a real estate broker is torn between his comfortably familiar wife and his searing passion for a male dog groomer. Joyce Carol Oates's unsettling "Morning" features a graduate student who embarks on an adulterous affair with one of her professors. Some of these stories render sexual encounters in graphic terms, particularly Harold Brodkey's "Innocence," which centers on a young man's determined effort to bring his lover to climax. Presumably set in India, William Kotzwinkle's erotic "Jewel of the Moon" evokes the Kama Sutra. Dark (also the editor of The Literary Ghost ) takes pains to justify his choices, emphasizing in his introduction the difference between literature and pornography and noting that stories about adulterous affairs do not mean that "the writers are advocating promiscuity"--but these splendid stories need no apologies.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140171649
• ISBN 13: 9780140171648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Dark Larry