The Book of Love

by Diane Ackerman

ACE 0393045897 ( 9780393045895)
Culled from love letters, poetry, fiction, personal essays, and memoirs, this lavish and fascinating anthology celebrates humankind's grandest pastime and 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.

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

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

864 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 1998

About the author

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 bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses.

The Zookeeper’s Wife, a little known true story of WWII, became a New York Times bestseller, and received the Orion Book Award, which honored it as, "a groundbreaking work of nonfiction." A movie of The Zookeeper’s Wife, starring Jessica Chastain and Daniel Brühl, releases in theaters March 31st, 2017 from Focus Features.

She lives with her husband Paul West in Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

[Abbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a present from a boyfriend back in college. The boyfriend is long gone but I held onto the book, which compiles hundreds of poems, fiction, essays, and letters, ranging from ancient Egypt to modern times, on the topic that occupies pretty much every human on earth.

That's Love, btw, if you didn't guess.

By its nature, it's a bit uneven. Some pieces are great, others are blah. But worth having around if you're a quotehound or a sentimental type.

[Pablo Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha encantado y eso que era una lectura obligatoria de la clase de inglés en mi instituto.

[Anubis · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to get this book for a class. Admittedly, it was nice to have the collection of poetry in one place, but the excerpts from novels spanning literary history were frustrating. Completely taken out of context, these excerpts are only useful if you want to get an idea of the writer's style, not if you want to get an idea how writing about love evolved over time.

[Nash Tysmans]

This was a surprise gift that I received on the first day of school from a former professor. It was providential for its timing and I should really stop denying how much I like reading these kinds of anthologies.

The pieces I've read so far are beautiful. I'm looking forward to finishing it.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and literary love stories, poems, and essays.