The Darts of Cupid: And Other Stories - Tapa dura

In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton, now eighty-seven, gives us a sweeping and intimate exposé of her century, and of the lives of women caught in the historic and personal contingencies it engendered. The unforgettable title story was celebrated upon its original publication in The New Yorker for its explicit portrayal of the relationship between a young British woman and her American superior in a provincial war office during World War II - a love affair that lasted only two nights but changed the narrator's life forever, and is still haunting today, more than thirty years after the story was written. Other stories take us from the tumbledown glamour of a Bohemian castle between the wars to an apartment on the coast of Italy in the 1990s, where a rich widow's decision to sell her husband's prized silver becomes a bewitching tale of longing.

In the same elegant and understated voice that brought us the extraordinary novel, Gordon, Edith Templeton presents us with a lost world in all its heartbreaking detail. This book is the record of a unique sensibility: whatever the period, Templeton addresses the truth about female passion with a forthright gaze that is rare for any age.

Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916 and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. She was educated at the French lycée in Prague and left the city in 1938 to marry an Englishman. During her years in England she worked in the Office of the Chief Surgeon for the U.S. Army in Cheltenham and then became a captain in the British Army, working as a conference interpreter. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s (and will be published by Viking in 2004 in one volume entitled The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories). Over the next several decades she published a number of novels as well as a popular travel book, The Surprise of Cremona.

Edith Templeton left England in 1956 to live in India with her second husband, a noted cardiologist and the physician to the king of Nepal. Gordon first appeared in 1966 under a pseudonym and was subsequently banned in England and Germany, and was then pirated around the world. The author has lived in various parts of Europe and now makes her home in Bordighera, on the coast of Italy.