BookBrowse Reviews My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Short Stories. 'Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer'

When was the last time you read Chekov, Faulkner, Joyce, and Nabokov all in one week? Maybe in college. But certainly not Lorrie Moore, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, and Denis Johnson, too? If it all sounds like a discordant, overwhelming combination of writers, I'm here to tell you it's decidedly not. Like a great mixtape, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead is a conceptually coherent and artfully conceived gathering of pieces, curated with deep passion for its parts, but also with a concern for how it resonates as a whole. Jeffrey Eugenides picks both the orthodox (Chekov's The Lady With the Little Dog and Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) and the...