The book of love
By: edited by Diane Ackerman & Jeanne Mackin.
Contributors: Ackerman, Diane.; Mackin, Jeanne.
Edition: 1st ed. (1)
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 827
ISBN-13: 9780393045895
Copyright date: 1998
Subjects: Love -- Literary collections
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Anonymous, Ancient Egypt The King's Son --; title: Anonymous Inscription in the tomb of Queen Ahmose, wife of Tuthmosis I --; title: Anonymous from Gilamesh --; title: Longus from The Loves of Daphnis and Chloe --; title: Apuleius of Madaura from The Metamorphoses or Golden Ass --; title: Heliodorus from The Aethiopica --; title: Anonymous from Aucassins and Nicolette --; title: Marie de France The Lay of the Two Lovers --; title: Sir Thomas Malory from Le Morte D'Arthur --; title: Margaret, Queen of Navarre from The Heptameron --; title: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra from Don Quijote de la Mancha --; title: P'u Sung-ling The Young Lady of the Tung-T'ing Lake --; title: Aphra Behn from Love Letters Between a Noble-Man and His Sister --; title: Daniel Defoe from Moll Flanders --; title: Samuel Richardson from The History of Clarissa Harlowe --; title: Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay) from Evelina, or A Young Lady's Entrance into the World --; title: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus --; title: Jane Austen from Pride and Prejudice --; title: Charlotte Bronte from Jane Eyre --; title: William Makepeace Thackeray from Vanity Fair --; title: Emily Bronte from Wuthering Heights --; title: Nathaniel Hawthorne from The Scarlet Letter --; title: Gustave Flaubert from Madame Bovary --; title: Thomas Carlyle from Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh --; title: Benjamin Disraeli from Coningsby --; title: Charles Dickens from David Copperfield --; title: Anthony Trollope from An Old Man's Love --; title: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) from The Lifted Veil --; title: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) from The Diary of Adam and Eve --; title: Leo Tolstoy from Anna Karenina and Resurrection --; title: Ivan Turgenev from First Love --; title: Anton Chekhov The Kiss --; title: Anatole France from The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard --; title: Richard Burton from The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night --; title: Guy de Maupassant Love: Three Pages from a Sportsman's Book --; title: Thomas Hardy from Under the Greenwood Tree and Tess of the D'Urbervilles --; title: Sarah Orne Jewett from The Country of the Pointed Firs --; title: Henry James from Daisy Miller: A Study --; title: Kate Chopin Caline --; title: Willa Cather A Resurrection --; title: Oscar Wilde from The Importance of Being Earnest and The Nightingale and the Rose --; title: O. Henry The Gift of the Magi --; title: Edith Wharton from Summer --; title: Bruno Schulz from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass --; title: Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin from The Beast of the Haitian Hills --; title: Thomas Wolfe from The Web and the Rock --; title: Alice Adams Complicities --; title: Kim Addonizio Survivors --; title: Anthony Caputi from To Know the Wind Is Mortal --; title: Nicholas Delbanco from Count Rumford: His Book --; title: E.L. Doctrow Willi --; title: Lamar Herrin from The Lies Boys Tell --; title: Edward Hower Miriamu and the King --; title: William Kennedy from Ironweed --; title: Milan Kundera from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting --; title: Alison Lurie Something Borrowed, Something Blue --; title: Jeanne Mackin from The Wise and Foolish Virgins --; title: Robert Morgan from The Truest Pleasure --; title: Bradford Morrow from The Almanac Branch --; title: Stephen F. Poleskie Love and Janus Zyvka --; title: Joanna Scott from The Manikin --; title: Amy Tan from The Hundred Secret Senses --; title: John Vernon from All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar --; title: Paul West from Life with Swan --; title: Hilma Wolitzer Sundays --; title: Anonymous A Father's Advice to His Daughter, from the Aztec Codices --; title: Plato from Phaedrus --; title: Aristotle from Ethica Nicomachea --; title: The Bible from Proverbs and Corinthians --; title: Seneca On Grief for Lost Friends --; title: Plutarch from The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans --; title: Vatsyayana from The Kama Sutra --; title: Boethius from The Consolation of Philosophy --; title: Hugh of Saint Victor from Of the Nature of Love --; title: Andreas Capellanus from The Art of Courtly Love --; title: Michel de Montaigne That Our Desires Are Increased by Difficulty --; title: Johannes Secundus from The Kisses --; title: Count Baldesar Castiglione from The Book of the Courtier --; title: Thomas Dekker from The Bachelor's Banquet --; title: Francis Bacon The Myth of Cupid and Of Love --; title: Sir Thomas Overbury An Amorist --; title: Robert Burton from The Anatomy of Melancholy --; title: John Donne That Women Ought to Paint --; title: Sir Richard Steele Conversations on Marriage --; title: Benjamin Frankl.