Read The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov

I'D BUY ANY BOOK WITH Jeffrey Eugenides' name on the cover. I've never met him, but I think he is a rare and remarkable writer. And here he is, not writing himself for once, but editing an impressive - and disconcerting - anthology of love stories, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead.

Love is, of course, extremely underfoot at this time of year. On Thursday, to my annual delight, my local M&S will disgorge numbers of men, all clutching identical bunches of flawless crimson roses, and all wearing the expression of dogs invited to sit - just this once - on the forbidden sofa: defiant, complacent and nervous.

In my view, most of them would be better off ditching the roses and taking this book along to the obligatory candlelit dinner for two instead.

Eugenides has written a marvellous little essay on the love story to introduce his choices. It all began, he says, in a Michigan schoolroom, when he was 15; a plainly inspired Latin teacher made the class understand that two words in Catullus's frustrated lament that his mistress's dead pet sparrow still meant more to her than he did, sounded like birdsong. And not just birdsong, but elegiac birdsong, the first taste of the emotional power that exists, in life, in something that one simply cannot have. And that power is never more supreme than when applied to love.

Romantic love, the stuff of candles and roses and rings, is not, Eugenides maintains, the province of love stories. “Love stories,” he says boldly, “nearly without exception, give love a bad name”. The tension, the energy, the dark compulsion of a really good love story, don't come from having a home on the hill for just we two, but from not being able to have it. The memorable love story thrives on yearning and unrequited passion, on struggle and injustice and inequality, on adoreds and adorers never quite getting it together. And also, crucially, on love's own caprice and transience.

In Japan, the spring custom is to make a rapturous ceremony of Sakura, cherry blossom time. This is partly because the blossom is both lavish and ravishing, but also because it is fragile and perishable, so that its beauty is haunted by its imminent fading. So it is with the love in a good love story - the eros, Eugenides insists, not the agape - because “say what you want about love: death will finish it”. This love feeds upon fantasy and longing, and is part of the human emotional condition: “Push it down in one place, and it rises in another.”

It's hardly surprising, then, to find that the stories in this collection are as unsettling as they are stimulating. I thought, when I began to read, that I was going to be able to skip a few familiar ones (Chekhov's exquisite The Lady With the Little Dog, William Trevor's poignant Lovers of Their Time, Alice Munro's near perfect The Bear Came Over the Mountain) but found that I couldn't. Juxtaposed as they are, even the familiar have a new dimension because of their context in the book - Chekhov after a Harold Brodkey and followed by a truly Southern Gothic offering from William Faulkner, and Alice Munro bringing up the rear as a quiet and lethal reminder of where all loves might end.

And in between the known stories, there are some valuable and startling strangers. Having just seen the latest Ang Lee movie, based on an Eileen Chang short story, it was fascinating to find her Red Rose, White Rose here. She, and Chekhov, are not the only non-English speaking writers - there are stories from Guy de Maupassant, from Nabokov (a lovely contribution) from Isaac Babel and David Bezmozgis.

There are also some arresting American stories, such as Stuart Dybeck's account of teenage frustration in We Didn't and Harold Brodkey's outrageous and unflinching Innocence. Add Lorrie Moore, and Richard Ford at his most uncompromising, and Deborah Eisenberg's weird, affecting Some Other Better Otto, and you have an outstanding collection. Even the stories I couldn't get on with - Robert Musil's Tonka, for example - still made me feel that they needed to be there.

In painting, the subject of the Annunciation seems to summon something profound, and special, from even the most sophisticated painter. Perhaps, in this difficult and intense genre of the short story, the love story, as defined by Eugenides, has something of the same effect on writers.

It's as if none of them can fail to respond, with honesty, to everything implicit in one of Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics for South Pacific: “This, nearly, was mine.” And, of course, it's all in the nearly ...

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides
HarperPress, £14.99; 576pp

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