My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  He stayed near the phone, looking at magazines, but he didn’t pick it up when it rang again.

  “Grant. This is Marian. I was down in the basement putting the wash in the dryer and I heard the phone and when I got upstairs whoever it was had hung up. So I just thought I ought to say I was here. If it was you and if you are even home. Because I don’t have a machine obviously, so you couldn’t leave a message. So I just wanted. To let you know.

  “Bye.”

  The time was now twenty-five after ten.

  Bye.

  He would say that he ’d just got home. There was no point in bringing to her mind the picture of his sitting here, weighing the pros and cons.

  Drapes. That would be her word for the blue curtains—drapes. And

  why not? He thought of the ginger cookies so perfectly round that she ’d had to announce they were homemade, the ceramic coffee mugs on their ceramic tree. A plastic runner, he was sure, protecting the hall carpet. A high-gloss exactness and practicality that his mother had never achieved but would have admired—was that why he could feel this twinge of

  bizarre and unreliable affection? Or was it because he ’d had two more drinks after the first?

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  The walnut-stain tan—he believed now that it was a tan—of her face and neck would most likely continue into her cleavage, which would be deep, crepey-skinned, odorous and hot. He had that to think of, as he dialled the number that he had already written down. That and the practical sensuality of her cat ’s tongue. Her gemstone eyes.

  Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady, warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.

  She had a book open in her lap.

  She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found, it ’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms.

  The people staying here are not necessarily honest. And I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up. I never wear yellow.”

  “Fiona . . . ,” he said.

  “You’ve been gone a long time. Are we all checked out now?”

  “Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember

  Aubrey?”

  She stared at him for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags.

  “Names elude me,” she said harshly.

  Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some

  bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water.

  “I’m happy to see you,” she said, and pulled his earlobes.

  “You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”

  He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.

  a b o u t t h e c o n t r i b u t o r s

  isaac babel (1894–1940) was born in Odessa, Ukraine (formerly Russia). At the age of twenty-one he went to St. Petersburg, and in 1923 he wrote a number of short stories printed in periodicals. An instant literary success, these formed the nucleus of the Odessa Stories. Other stories, scenarios, and plays followed, including The Red Cavalry. Unable to conform to the demands for political conformism that were being made on him, however, Babel was arrested in 1939 and was eventually killed by Stalin’s police in 1940.

  david bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia. In 1980 he immigrated

  with his parents to Toronto. He received an Honors Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from McGill University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Walrus, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, 2005. His collection of stories, Natasha, was published to widespread critical acclaim. He lives in Toronto.

  harold brodkey (1930–1996) was born in Staunton, Illinois, and

  raised in University City, Missouri, outside St. Louis. After graduating from Harvard University, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines. His stories won him two first-place O. Henry Awards. His story collections include First Love and Other Sorrows, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, and The World Is the Home of Love and Death. He is also the author of the novels Women and Angels, The Runaway Soul, and Profane Friendship, and a collection of nonfiction titled Sea Battles on Dry Land.

  raymond carver (1938–1988) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in

  1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a

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  About the Contributors

  National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I’m Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in August of that year, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.

  eileen chang (1920–1995), who lived in the United States after fleeing Communist China in 1956, was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, and public intellectual. She is the author of Romances, The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China, and The Rouge of the North.

  anton pavlovich chekhov (1860–1904) was born in Taganrog,

  Ukraine. First published in the 1880s, he was a celebrated figure in Russia by the time of his death in 1904, but he remained relatively unknown internationally until the years after World War I, when his works were translated into English. His essays, plays, poetry, and short fiction have been translated into countless languages.

  stuart dybek is the award-winning author of the story collection

  Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, I Sailed with Magellan, and The Coast of Chicago, and the poetry collections Brass Knuckles and Streets in Their Own Ink. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1973

  and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University.

  His many awards include a PEN/Malamud Prize, a Lannan Award, and

  Whiting Writers’ Award.

  deborah eisenberg is the author of four story collections: Transac-tions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellow-

  ship, and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

  jeffrey eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and

  Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published

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  to great acclaim in 1993 and was made into a film directed by Sofia Cop-pola. His second novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  william faulkner (1897–1962) was born in New Albany, Missis-

  sippi. His most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! , and The Unvanquished.

  In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His novel A Fable won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955, and his Collected Stories won the National Book Award in 1951.

  richard ford is the author of the story collections Rock Springs, Women with Men, and A Multitude of Sins as well as six novels: A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife, Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and, most recently, The Lay of the Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  david gates is a staff wri
ter for Newsweek and lives in New York. He has been published in Esquire, GQ, Grand Street, Ploughshares, TriQuar-terly, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. His collection of stories, The Wonders of the Invisible World, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  denis johnson is the author of Jesus’ Son, a critically acclaimed story collection, six novels, most recently Tree of Smoke, a collection of poetry, and a book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, among many other

  honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

  james joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882.

  His writings include Chamber Music, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses, Poems Penyeach, Finnegans Wake, and

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  an early draft of A Portrait of a Young Man, Stephan Hero, which was published posthumously.

  miranda july is a filmmaker, writer, and performance artist. Her

  work has been presented at sites such as The Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum, and in two Whitney Biennials. She wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which received numerous awards. July’s short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Zoetrope, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, was published in 2007.

  milan kundera is a Franco-Czech novelist who was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, and The Curtain, were originally written in French.

  bernard malamud (1914–1986) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulit-

  zer Prize and the National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.

  guy de maupassant (1850–1893) was born in France in 1850 and

  fought in the Franco-Prussian War before becoming a protégé of Gus-tave Flaubert. He published dozens of articles, nearly three hundred short stories, and six novels, the best known of which are A Woman’s Life, Bel-Ami, and Pierre and Jean.

  lorrie moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America and Self-Help, and the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and

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  Anagrams. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  alice munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the Univer-

  sity of Western Ontario. She has published eleven story collections—

  Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and a volume of selected stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward MacDowell Medal in Literature.

  Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into numerous languages.

  robert musil (1880–1942) was an English short-story writer, novelist, and playwright. His many works include The Man Without Qualities, Five Women (also published as Three Women), The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and The Confusions of Young Torless.

  vladimir nabokov (1899–1977) was born and raised in St. Peters-

  burg. He left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power, eventually living in England, Germany, and the United States. He is the author of numerous stories, plays, and novels, most notably Lolita, which he wrote in Russian and self-translated into English.

  grace paley (1922–2007) divided her time between New York City

  and Thetford Hill, Vermont. She is the author of the story collections The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day. Her Collected Stories was a finalist

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  About the Contributors

  for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She also wrote two books of poetry and one volume of poems and prose pieces, Long Walks and Intimate Talks. Paley taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Dartmouth, and the City College of New York. She was

  the recipient of the 1993 Vermont Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 1992 REA Award for Short Stories, and the 1989 Edith Wharton

  Award.

  mary robison was born in Washington, D.C. She graduated from

  Johns Hopkins, where she studied with John Barth. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She is the author of three previous novels, Oh!, Subtraction, and Why Did I Ever, and of four story collections, Days, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, Believe Them, and Tell Me. Robison has written for Hollywood and has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1977.

  george saunders is the author of In Persuasion Nation, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil; Pastoralia; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip; and the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and GQ. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for “bringing to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all of his own.” He teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.

  gilbert sorrentino (1929–2006) is the author of more than thirty

  books, including the classic Mulligan Stew and two novels that were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award: Little Casino and Aberration of Starlight. He was the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and the 2005 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Once an editor at Grove

  Press, Sorrentino taught at Stanford University before returning to his native Brooklyn.

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  william trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, and spent

  his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A

  highly acclaimed short-story writer, his notable collections include The Collected Stories, Two Lives, After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, and most recently Cheating at Canasta. His novels include Felicia’s Journey and The Story of Lucy Gault. He received the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1996.

  P e r m i s s i o n s

  Poems II and III from Catullus: The Complete Poems translated by Guy Lee (Oxford University Press, 1991), by permission of Oxford University Press.

  “First Love and Other Sorrows” from First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey, copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1964 by Ellen Brodkey.

  Reprinted here by permission of Henry Holt and Company LLC.

  “The Lady with the Little Dog,” translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, copyright © 2000 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Selected Short Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Love” from The Collected Stories by Grace Paley, copyright © 1994 by Grace Paley. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, LLC.

  “A Rose for Emily” from Collec
ted Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner, copyright © 1930 and renewed 1958 by William Faulkner. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “Dirty Wedding” from Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, copyright © 1992 by Denis Johnson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, LLC.

  “Natasha” from Natasha by David Bezmozgis, copyright © 2005 by David Bezmozgis. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, LLC, and HarperCollins Canada.

  “Some Other, Better Otto” from Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, copyright © 2006 by Deborah Eisenberg. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, LLC.

  “The Hitchhiking Game” from Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera, translated by Suzanne Rappaport, copyright © 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Lovers of Their Time” from The Collected Stories of William Trevor by William Trevor, copyright © 1978 by William Trevor. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  “Mouche” from Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant, translated and introduced by Roger Colet, copyright © 1971 by Roger Colet. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

  “The Moon in Its Flight” from The Moon in Its Flight by Gilbert Sorrentino, copyright © 1971, 2004 by Gilbert Sorrentino. Reprinted with the permission of Coffee House press, www.coffeehousepress.org.

  “Spring in Fialta” from The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright © 1995 by Dimitri Nabokov. Used by permission of Alfred A.

  Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “How to Be an Other Woman” from Self-Help by Lorrie Moore, copyright ©

  1985 by M. L. Moore. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Yours” from Tell Me: 30 Stories by Mary Robinson, Counterpoint 2002, copyright © Mary Robinson.

  “The Bad Thing” from The Wonders of the Invisible World by David Gates, copyright © 1999 by David Gates. Used be permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.