The Literary Lover: 2great Stories of Passion and Romance

This fine collection brings together a diverse array of 20 contemporary stories about love and lust. Arranged in a chronology of sorts, these tales trace affairs of the heart from adolescent puppy love (Steven Millhauser's ``The Sledding Party'') to the worn and weathered ties of a begrudging elderly couple (``Letter to the Lady of the House'' by Richard Bausch) and touch on many permutations in between. In David Leavitt's wrenching ``Houses,'' a real estate broker is torn between his comfortably familiar wife and his searing passion for a male dog groomer. Joyce Carol Oates's unsettling ``Morning'' features a graduate student who embarks on an adulterous affair with one of her professors. Some of these stories render sexual encounters in graphic terms, particularly Harold Brodkey's ``Innocence,'' which centers on a young man's determined effort to bring his lover to climax. Presumably set in India, William Kotzwinkle's erotic ``Jewel of the Moon'' evokes the Kama Sutra. Dark (also the editor of The Literary Ghost ) takes pains to justify his choices, emphasizing in his introduction the difference between literature and pornography and noting that stories about adulterous affairs do not mean that ``the writers are advocating promiscuity''--but these splendid stories need no apologies. (Feb.)