When the issue of love arises, there are a million theories to interpret it. However, when we deal with love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about total domination.

Love stories are based on disappointment, on wrong births, and on families that tear each other apart, on the boredom of marriage, and at least one heartless heart. Love stories, almost without exception, disparage love.

Read these stories, not to confirm the inhumane truths of love, but to experience the many and varied, reciprocal joys of it.

Perhaps only by reading a love story (or writing one) can we simultaneously participate in the ecstasy and the agony felt by lovers, without paying a very heavy emotional price.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]