The Book of Love - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045897 ISBN 13: 9780393045895

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

Synopsis

Culled from love letters, poetry, fiction, personal essays, and memoirs, this lavish and fascinating anthology celebrates humankind's grandest pastime and obsession: love.

How do we define love? "It feels like hunger pains, and we use the same word. Pang. Perhaps this is why Cupid is depicted with a quiver of arrows, because love feels at times like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence. . . . People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets." So writes Diane Ackerman in her insightful introduction.

Here is a panorama of fine writing about love's many moods and majesties, from all the veils of flirtation, seduction, and marriage to the tempests of suspicion, jealousy, and heartache. Here is a treasury of more than two hundred selections from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" There are excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Justine, The Odyssey, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as the letters from Baudelaire to Sabatier, George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, and Henry Miller to Anais Nin.

General readers and scholars alike will delight in this anthology's mix of the contemporary and the classic.

About this title

About the Authors

Diane Ackerman has been the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in addition to many other awards and recognitions for her work, which include the best-selling The Zookeeper's Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Jeanne Mackin is the author of three novels, most recently, Dreams of Empire. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

Designed as a gift book, this comprehensive anthology of love defined, presented, examined, and detailed for the general reader is expressly crafted to reflect the most salient literature on the topic. Begining with a good overview of early and classic writings, the work proceeds in roughly chronological order through Sophocles, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Henry Miller, and Anais Nin to the most contemporary writers, presenting powerful passages that have shaped history, altered personalities, calmed monsters, consoled the forlorn, and fueled national scandals. Fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters are all included, but the editors, noted poet/naturalist Ackerman and novelist Mackin (Dreams of Empire, Kensington, 1996), have kept the focus tight, creating a well-conceived volume that deserves the attention of all readers.?Richard K. Burns, Hatboro, Pa.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393045897
• ISBN 13: 9780393045895
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 864
• Editor: Ackerman Diane, MacKin Jeanne