But back to the poem. The pluperfect of "pipiabat" is elegiac: the bird "used to sing." Now its song has been silenced. Catullus, who in the previous poem had cause to wish the bird would fly away, now changes his mind. "Oh what a shame!" he writes. "O wretched sorrow! Your fault it is that now my girl's/Eyelids are swollen from crying."

Things were bad with the sparrow around. They're bad with the sparrow gone. Nothing is keeping Lesbia from giving all her love to Catullus now. But Lesbia's no longer in the mood. Worse, her crying has ruined her looks.

If Catullus gave us the confessional love story, these first two poems delineated its scope. The book you're holding in your hands, which takes its title from Catullus, is an anthology of love stories. They were all written in the past 120 years. There are translations from Russian, Chinese, French, Austrian, and Czech writers. There are stories by famous, dead writers and by young Americans, stories involving, as in Milan Kundera's "The Hitchhiking Game," two lovers taking a road trip in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, to the two terrifically well-groomed, adolescent "TrendSetters & TasteMakers" from the near future in George Saunders's "Jon," to the little Jewish boy in Isaac Babel's "First Love" who falls for the Christian neighbor who shelters him during a Russian pogrom. Despite the multiplicity of subjects and situations treated here, one Catullan requirement remains in force throughout. In each of these twenty-six love stories, either there is a sparrow or the sparrow is dead.

Excerpted from My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead by Jeffrey Eugenides. Copyright © 2008 by Jeffrey Eugenides. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.