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"Mother, do you know what Ceil Johnson said to me today? She said that Beryl Feringhaus—you know, the real-estate people—was heartbroken because she thought Sonny Bruster was going to get engaged to her.” My sister giggled. Her long hair was tangled, and my mother yanked a comb through it.

“Mayb…

Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the …

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. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Lo…

The stories in this volume fall within the continuum laid out by Catullus’s first two Lesbia poems: from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement. The narrator of “Spring in Fialta” recounts the many missed romantic opportunities he ’s had with a woman named Nina, whom he ’d first met, and …

[...] One of Chekhov’s admirers, Serafima Remizova, was highly disappointed with this ending. “I read your story,” she wrote to Chekhov in a letter, “and I should like to ask you to write the continuation of it. You have abandoned your heroes . . . at the most critical moment in their lives, when t…