Love Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series)

A book to savor before bedtime every night. You'll find yourself reading several stories at a time, because they're that good. Unexpected juxtapositions. Thanks for making these marvelous little Everyman stories collections. I also have Christmas Stories. I think I'll try Detective Stories and Sea Stories next.

Lovely collection for an anniversary or Valentine present.

This is excellent, good writing and short enough to finish for your bedtime read.

Wonderful authors and good stories.

I got this book for a book group. The stories I've read so far are not exactly what I think of when I hear "love stories". They are interesting though.

There are many aspects of romantic love to celebrate: passion, tenderness, caring, devotion, adoration, nurturing, vulnerability, affection, intimacy, gentleness, understanding, and trust. You will not find much of that stuff in this book.I accept the fact that not all love stories need to be happy. But frankly, a 50/50 ratio of happy to unhappy endings would have been a better curatorial choice than the overwhelming emphasis on jealousy, heartbreak, despair and death that permeates this collection. Yes, death. Lots of it, in fact.Of the nearly twenty stories in this book, three feature an attempted or completed suicide and two revolve around the deaths of infants. If self-annihilation and dead kids aren't your thing, then maybe you'd rather read about a marriage torn apart by a murder accusation, or a woman dying in a natural disaster after rejecting the man who loved her, or a story that ends with all four characters being killed in a car crash.Don't feel like confronting mortality at all? That's all right, because there's plenty of nonlethal tragedy in this anthology as well. Stories of marriages gone cold and lovers crushed by the pain of infidelity abound between these covers. Into schadenfruede? Try Dorothy Parker's bitterly cynical tale of two newlyweds getting off on the wrong foot with their constant bickering. Feeling a little too liberated and craving claustrophobic depression? Read Tobias Wolff's story of a restless, unfulfilled woman trapped in a suffocating and empty marriage. Dying to experience the agony of betrayal? Katherine Mansfield and Margaret Atwood have just the thing for you. Or maybe you just want to read Ali Smith's nice, pleasant story about a woman who falls in love with a tree.Some of these stories are not, in fact, bona fide love stories at all. Like most of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works, "Winter Dreams" is really an examination of the American class system and the elusiveness of upward mobility, with the love interest basically serving as a metaphor. Vladimir Nabokov's "'That In Aleppo Once...'" is a clever black comedy. D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is perhaps best viewed as an exploration of shifting post-WWI gender roles. These stories are better appreciated once they are seen for what they really are...but love stories they ain't.I'm tacking on an extra star in acknowledgement of the handful of stories I genuinely enjoyed ("Armande," "Clair de Lune," and "Immortality" were all standouts), but overall I feel misled and cheated by this book, and I think it was a bit sadistic of Diana Secker Tesdell to deliberately select so much bleak literature and then market it as a lovely gift for readers seeking romance and beauty. Imagine picking up a book called "Everyman's Pocket Parent-Child Stories", perhaps as a Mother's Day or Father's Day gift, and then finding out that three-quarters of the stories are about negligent, abusive, absent, or dying parents. Why didn't they just call this book "Everyman's Pocket Unhealthy Relationship Stories" instead?

LOVE STORIES presents a number of intriguing stories, many of them from writers outside the U. S. That said, I’ll confine this review to just two of them that I found particularly intriguing: T. C. Boyle’s “Swept Away” and Roald Dahl’s “Mr Botibol.” I’ve always felt that Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” is one of the best American short stories ever written. And why (apart from the plot)? Because London wrote about the fact of cold so effectively, I actually felt it every time I read his story. (No small accomplishment, I feel, in putting mere words to a page!) To his credit, T. C. Boyle manages the same effect in “Swept Away,” but with the wind. His setting is Scotland (as opposed to Alaska) but no matter. Wind is wind—wherever it blows—in, out, or between. What matters is only how effectively the author describes that wind, and how effectively (s)he makes you feel it as a reader. Boyle’s prose will make your hair, face and, yes—even your toenails—feel wind-swept even if your reading of his story is from inside a vacuum tube. With regard to Roald Dahl, I must confess that I never read him as a child. My loss. I know now that he’s generally thought of as a writer of children’s stories. But let me assure you (at least from this one example): his adult readings are well worth your investment. While perhaps not the “master of the surprise ending” that O. Henry was, he’s quite adept at that sort of thing if this story is any indication … not to mention that his sense of irony at the human condition is—if you will allow—ne plus ultra. Perhaps this sense of irony is the thing I particularly like about both T. C. Boyle and Roald Dahl. If you enjoy the same, have at it—and find your pleasant way to both stories, wherever you may find them. You won’t regret it.RRBBrooklyn, NY09 June 2017

First I must admit that I am a great fan of the Everyman's Library books. They are wonderful editions to own.This particular book, one of Everyman's "Pocket Classics" issues, is slightly smaller in size than most hardcover books; it fits very nicely in your hand, and it is beautifully produced and handsome to hold, either with or without the dust jacket (the book itself is bound in cloth and looks great without the jacket).This edition contains 19 stories, varying in length from 4 pages ("Immortality", by Yasunari Kawabata), to (44 pages ("Terrific Mother", by Lorrie Moore). Authors included are Guy De Maupassant, Italo Calvino, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Elizabeth Bowen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Colette, D. H. Lawrence, Roald Dahl, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yasunari Kawabata, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, William Trevor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, and Ali Smith. There are no special introductions to the book or to the stories, simply the stories themselves, presented one after the other, with acknowledgements at the end stating where they first appeared.I think that this is a very nice book to present to a loved one, or for yourself.