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Product Description
When Edith Templeton’s stories began appearing in The New Yorker in the late 1950s, she quickly became a favorite of the magazine’s discerning readers. Her finely honed writing, honestly drawn heroines, and distinctive themes secured her reputation.
The Dart’s of Cupid collects seven of Templeton’s stories for the first time and reintroduces one of the truly great writers of the twentieth century. In settings ranging from a decrepit Bohemian castle between the wars to London during World War II to the Italian Riviera in the 1990s, the heroines of these stories often find themselves confronting unfathomable passsions and perplexing actions by others, but they seldom feel regret.
Amazon.com Review
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
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