A Lover's Question

Thomas Farber's works of fiction, creative nonfiction, and the epigrammatic reveal him as a writer charting the voyage of his generation with luminous, scrupulous integrity. Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, he achieves large effects with deceptively simple means. Such elegant economy, unsentimental but deeply compassionate, compels us to recognize these lives-in and out of love-as our own. The stories selected here, with an introduction by the author, are from Who Wrote the Book of Love? (1977), Hazards to the Human Heart (1980), and Learning to Love It (1993).