The Darts of Cupid: Stories - Softcover

As a girl in 1920s Prague, Edith Templeton caused a scandal by writing a school essay about how well-heated her private academy was--during a coal strike. This turned out to be a predictive event: Templeton's fiction illuminates the political by way of the intensely personal. In the title story of the exquisite collection The Darts of Cupid, a young woman's love affair is shaped by the tragedies of World War II. (This particular piece is so personal that upon its 1968 publication in The New Yorker, it made history as the most explicit story ever published by that magazine.) Templeton's stories are filled with acid-tongued girls, cynical older men, and frighteningly acute observations, such as "malice is the luxury of underlings." Bitterly funny and steeped in modern history, The Darts of Cupid places Templeton squarely in the company of Maeve Brennan and Sybille Bedford. These recently rediscovered midcentury women writers made unflinching fiction. --Claire Dederer

“Daringly unconventional. . . . [S]parkling with untold hazard, like pieces of cut glass.” —The New York Times Book Review

"In these splendid stories, Edith Templeton, at her cosmopolitan best, rivals our other Edith: she has Mrs. Wharton's cool stare that sees all round her characters while never refusing us the pleasure of an unanticipated surprise." —Gore Vidal

“Love–or desire, and the two are at once distinct and intertwined here–is the ordering principle of these stories, the prism through which the world is seen. . . . [V]ivid and rich.” —Newsday

“Templeton’s ability to pierce through the deepest reaches of longing, desire, lust and loneliness crosses the gender divide. . . . [Templeton] is one of the great social observers of the twentieth century.” —Toronto Star

“In these sensuous, refined . . . stories . . . Templeton . . . never suffers any fool gladly, least of all when that fool happens to be herself.” —Vogue

“[B]reathtaking. . . . Templeton is an overlooked treasure of worldly sophistication, psychological insight and dry wit. . . . A brilliant eavesdropper of the Henry James—Edith Wharton school.” —Book