Passion and Affect: Stories

The debut story collection from one of America’s most beloved authors

Laurie Colwin explores the mysteries of life and love with her signature blend of empathy, wisdom, and wit in these fourteen exquisite tales. In “Animal Behavior,” an ornithologist and a doctoral student find their own mating habits to be just as inscrutable as those of their avian subjects. In “The Elite Viewer,” when his wife travels to England to attend a seminar, Benno Moran searches for exotic ways to occupy his time. He discovers television, junk food, and Greenie Frenzel, a young woman with Technicolor hair and an appetite for cherry soda and mentholated cigarettes. “Children, Dogs, and Desperate Men” is the story of Elizabeth Bayard, a sensible music critic whose flirtation with a married cartographer is the latest in a series of romantic missteps as irrational as they are irresistible.

The heroes and heroines of Passion and Affect are clever, naive, brave, delicate, and fickle. In other words, they are profoundly human, and their precisely observed, warmly intelligent stories capture nothing less than what it means to be alive in the modern world.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Laurie Colwin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.