cover image The World Treasury of Love Stories

The World Treasury of Love Stories

. Oxford University Press, USA, $30 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-19-509361-2

The 38 selections in this wide-ranging, well-chosen anthology explore love both in its universality and in the context of specific times, places and cultures. In Sandra Cisneros's impassioned ``Eyes of Zapata,'' a Mexican peasant, who as a young girl lived with the revolutionary leader, bitterly recalls his comings and goings, his betrayals with other women and his real mistress-the revolution. Marital devotion is taken to its ultimate expression in Yukio Mishima's ``Patriotism,'' in which a military wife follows her husband in a joint suicide in imperial Japan of 1936. William Trevor's ``Lovers of Their time,'' a wry account of a feverish extramarital affair spanning the 1960s in London, meshes the lovers' artful evasions with the trendiness and erotic euphoria of that decade. Along with classics by Flaubert, Hawthorne, Chekhov and Wharton, there are fine tales by such modern masters as Cheever, Nabokov, Lawrence, Updike, Calvino, Colette, V.S. Pritchett, Milan Kundera, I.B. Singer, Gail Godwin, Jose Donoso, Doris Lessing and Raymond Carver. There's also Jewelle Gomez's ``Don't Explain,'' a portrait of a black lesbian waitress mourning the end of an affair and Billie Holliday's death, and German playwright Heinrich von Kleist's twisty 1811 novella of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, ``The Marquise of O.'' Refreshingly unromantic and down-to-earth, these stories illumine the contrariness of love, romance and sex with psychological acuity. (Feb.)