Objects of desire

This is true in a very different sense in two other stories here: Mary Robison's short, affecting "Yours" and Alice Munro's remarkable and complicated novella "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (recently adapted into the film "Away From Her"). In both, a sick body makes a mockery of love. Inevitably, no matter how strong the bonds -- and no matter how extraordinary, genuine and ennobling the final expression of affection -- someone is left alone.

Of course, not all love stories end in death, alienation, ambivalence, uncertainty or tears. You'd be hard-pressed to find a popular movie or novel that did. But short stories offer a different escape -- not from unhappiness, but into it. Reading these tales is an exercise first in empathy and then in schadenfreude. Love stories complicate and confirm our own experiences; we feel acutely the thrills and the traumas. But the end comes quickly, before we become too invested. We're free to watch from a safe vantage. Witnessing the characters' loneliness relieves our own. Their pain becomes our pleasure -- especially when, as is often the case in these stories, the darkness is lightened by humor.

The mix chosen by Eugenides is wonderful. (All proceeds from the book will go to support the youth writing program 826 Chicago, a spin-off of the program Dave Eggers founded in San Francisco.) There are a few missteps (William Faulkner's grotesque "A Rose for Emily" is not, to my mind, a love story), but Eugenides does a good job of including less obvious choices (by George Saunders, David Bezmozgis and Deborah Eisenberg, to name a few) along with old standards that reward rereading (James Joyce's "The Dead"; Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With the Little Dog") and great hits by the genre's masters (Grace Paley, William Trevor and Raymond Carver among them). Harold Brodkey justly makes the cut twice.

The plots are wildly different; the range in tone, form and style is immense. This brings unexpected delights. It is, for example, a small thrill to go from the solemn, lapidary language of "The Dead" straight into Denis Johnson's "Dirty Wedding," with its rush of words and inarticulate speed ("yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah"). And it is a bigger thrill to realize that however painful the heartbreak, love offers real rewards -- and these stories are among them.