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Informationen zum Autor Edited by Roger Angell Klappentext Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez, Mavis Gallant, Julian Barnes, Michael Chabon, Jamaica Kincaid, John O'Hara, Muriel Spark, Ann Beattie, and William Maxwell are among the contributors to Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker--assembled by Roger Angell, senior editor at The New Yorker. This is the first fiction anthology in more than three decades from the magazine that has defined the American short story for almost a century. As noteworthy for its range as for its excellence, Nothing But You features a stunning array of present and past masters writing about love in all its varieties, from the classic love story to dislocated narratives of weird modern romance. Taken separately, these stories suggest the infinite variety of the human heart. Taken together, they are a literary milestone, a comprehensive review of the way we live and love now.Introduction Reading the stories in this book will make many of us wish to fall in love again, but just as often, I think, it will be quite the other way: My God, spare me, just this once. Save me from this unexpected woman, this unlikely man-from this sudden happiness and then the crushing loss. Don't let me wait for her phone call or for another one of her ill-spelled, beautiful letters. Enough of plans and heartfelt talks and wearying complication, enough with tears. But then, as we go on reading, we may change our minds. I don't care-I want it all, no matter what. Bring it back, let me be in love again. What we can envy these lovers, either way, is their energy. Give them a whisper of romance, the barest twitch of intrigue, one heated breath from the open ovens of sex, and they are changed beyond all recognition. Eagerly they wander into the garden, scratch out an eye, fall into the river, throw over a wife or a husband or a devoted partner, and leap headlong into postures of entranced pleasure and humiliation, hopeless attachment or sensual ennui-all for the sake of the red-haired woman from 6 Krochmalna Street; for the old gentleman with the umbrella; for the seamstress who appears at her doorway with a towel in her hand; for the young woman seen weeping on the street; for the attention of a careless, long-departed family of neighbors or of a childhood friend, who, like as not, has barely noticed the connection or kept a moment's memory of whatever it was that meant the world to this lonely girl or to that impoverished professor. Nothing will stop these lovers. A ring on the phone, the glimpse of an estranged spouse or remembered sweetheart, a chance for an entanglement or a shot at escape, and they are out the door and out of sight. Away they go-dashing through traffic and off to San Francisco, to Uzbekistan, to Brisbane, to the Rue Saint-Didier, to Barcelona, to the King's Inn in Dublin, to Nashville and Yonville, overnight to many distant cities. That electric title for Donald Barthelme's story, which closes this collection, was spotted by him on the side of a passing mover's van. Love drives us onward-or keeps us at home, noticing and longing, or grasping after what was here all along. What a mess! What a situation! What a subject for a writer! When the idea for this collection first came to me-an anthology of New Yorker fiction, the first one in thirty years, but this time assembled around a single theme-I was enticed by a dozen-odd particular stories that had stayed clear in my mind for years (many of them are in this book), and also by the delusion that others would be easy to find, because we all know what makes a love story, after all. But the definition wouldn't stay put. The more stories I read (and set aside and read again), the more kinds of love and lovers began to move in around me and demand attention. I quickly saw that I would have to make room for a mother's love for her dying son, and for the baby-sitter called in to a...
