This is more like 3.5 stars because some of the stories are obviously just lazy filler while some were pretty great and some were pull your heart out of your butt great.
I suggest this for a pick up and put down rotation for when you're reading a book with a different topic and maybe want something to just change it up. I know I'm not the only one who does that haha

A set of love stories as varied as love itself.
Some make you sad and maybe even angry, others just make you smile and also wish you are not forsaken.

Best story: George Saunders' Jon

Miranda July's "Something that Needs Nothing" blew me away. I'm smitten.

Other stories of note:
**Milan Kundera, "The Hitchhiking Game"
**William Trevor, "Lovers of their Time"
*Guy de Maupassant, "Mouche"
*Robert Musil, "Tonka"
***George Saunders, "Jon"

Eugenides' introduction is excellent as well. Bravo! Definitely a collection I'll own someday.

I love short stories. And I love LOVE stories. So I bought this book prepared to be heartbroken and joyful and wallow in the genius of truly magnificent writing. After all the book promises these are the GREATEST love stories.

Well I started reading. And eventually I slowed down. I wasn't looking forward to each story. I just wanted to finish the bloody book. Hardly any of the stories moved me. Did I have a heart of stone?

I finally twigged what the problem was when I looked at the authors list at the back of the book.

21 out of 27 of the authors are male.

6 are female

21 are American

26 are white

So what you have is a book of love stories from the view point of mostly white American men collected by a white American man.

I am appalled. How limited is the reading list of Jeffrey Eugenides? And who on earth thought it was a good idea to let him pick a short story collection?

If you are a white male then you will probably love this book. If not and you are bored to tears by the white male dominated culture of fiction, journalism, tv and cinema then give this book a miss. It's not worth the effort or the snores.

As with all collections of short stories, some of these I liked very much, a couple I hated and most of them didn't really grab me one way or another. Add that straight fiction isn't exactly my thing, and this ended up not being exactly my sort of book.

so good.."And the Aurabon would make things better, as Aurabon always makes things better, although soon what I found was, when you are hooking in like eight or nine times a day, you are always so happy, and yet it is a kind of happy like chewing on tinfoil, and once you are living for that sort of happy, you soon cannot be happy enough, even when you are very very happy and are even near tears due to the beauty of the round metal hooks used to hang your facility curtains, you feel this intense wish to be even happier, so you tear yourself away from the beautiful curatin hooks and with shaking happy hands fill out another Work-Affecting Mood-Problem Nnotification, and then, because nothing in your facility is beautiful enough to look at with your new level of happiness, you sit in the much-coveted window seat and start lendelling in this crazy uncontrolled way, calling up, say, the Nike one with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (LI 89736)....""Jon" - George Saunders

A couple of the short stories I loved, the most I liked or didn't quite fall into my taste. Still a book with stories worth recommending.

These were not traditional love stories.

Love stories come in various packages so I was quite surprised by the breadth of different love stories in this anthology. It's safe to say that I've read better love stories than the ones that made it in this book. I had to skim some stories because they were so dense and hard-hitting and employed many words (and paragraphs) to talk about something that could be narrowed down in one sentence. Not a sucker for brevity but long-winded sentences tend to bore me down.

Favorites in this book:

The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
Lovers of their Time by William Trevor
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
Fireworks by Richard Ford
The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud
The Bear Came Over the Mountain by Alice Munro