For better, for worse

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson

When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’:

I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.

Vonnegut was probably right about that — but most writers have taken that realisation as a licence to indulge. Diana Secker Tesdell’s collection of short stories about love — which, in good Everyman’s Library fashion, brings some classics together with the best new writing — shows just how gaga the reader can go, given encouragement.

Opening with Maupassant’s ‘Clair de Lune’ — an immaculate exercise in irony, in which the pious-proud Abbé Marignan is allowed a brief glimmer of self-knowledge — it includes a lively variety. Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and Italo Calvino jostle with Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore and William Trevor, all of them on top form. ‘Armande’, by Colette, describes a young couple too shy to declare themselves — only to have their destinies changed by a falling chandelier. It sounds absurd but it tweaks the heart terribly in the final line. So does a gorgeous ghost story, ‘Immortality’, by Yasunari Kawabata.