The Darts of Cupid

Apr 20, 2025 8:25 PM

Author:Edith Templeton

The Darts of Cupid

The highly-acclaimed short story collection by the author of Gordon, the erotic novel banned for indecency in 1966

In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton gives a sweeping and intimate exposé of her century and the lives of the women who lived in it. 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. 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.

Whatever the period, Templeton addresses the truth about female passion with a forthright gaze that is rare for any age.

'[Templeton's stories] make the flesh tingle' Observer

'Templeton's characters are not passive or self-doubting. Their pleasure in sexual submission is a mark of their toughness: they can take what their men give them' The New York Times

'Dark, compelling and invigoratingly unsettling' Sunday Times

Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916 and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. Her short stories began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1950s and caused a major stir because of their sexual explicitness (these stories are available in one volume entitled The Darts of Cupid as a Penguin ebook). Gordon first appeared in 1966 under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook and was subsequently banned in England and Germany; it was then pirated around the world, appearing under various titles. In 2001, Edith Templeton agreed to publish the novel, with its original title, under her own name. She died in 2006.

Reviews

She's a genius, genuinely modern in the heroic, glorious sense

—— Alain de Botton

One of the most gifted writers of her generation

—— Scotsman

Sophisticated, reticent, ornate, stark, supple, stiff, savage or forgiving...they are stories from the prime of life

—— Times Literary Supplement

An outstanding correspondent on the war between the sexes writes as wittily as ever on the hopes and shortcomings of women who bake for poets, sleep with their accountants, attribute their preference for awful men to fearlessness, and don't know how much they scare their own mothers

—— Observer

As in the plays, it is the force and adroitness of his curiosity that impresses.

—— Guardian

Although Murakami's style and deadpan humour are wonderfully distinctive, his emotional territory is more familiar - remorse, unresolved confusion, sudden epiphanies - though heightened by the surreal... For all its peculiarity, Planet Murakami offers a recognisable landscape of our fears

—— Observer

Disarming, amusing and reveals his lightness of touch

—— Scotland on Sunday

A beguiling collection that shows off Murakami's bold inventiveness and deep compassion

—— Metro

Murakami is excellent at creating an intense mood in a swift few lines... always provocative and never less than engaging

—— Daily Telegraph

By turns disturbing and delightful, funny strange and funny ha-ha...Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a handsome volume of prose, every bit as substantial as a novel...They show him at his very best; not as a cult novelist but as a really first-rate writer of short fiction

—— Guardian

Funny but also sad and wise

—— Sunday Telegraph

Murakami’s fictional world is extraordinary.

—— The Sunday Times

Julian Barnes reminds us what an exhilarating experience it can be to read a really good critic.

—— Jane Shilling , Sunday Telegraph

A compulsive page-turner.

—— Tim Adams , Observer

Barnes’s passion for his writers is infectious.

—— Ion Trewin , Sunday Express

Blissfully intelligent.

—— Roger Lewis , Financial Times

The temptation to turn away is powerful, but the rewards for resisting it are considerable. These essays combine a scholarly breadth of knowledge with a powerful sense of the absurdities of the creative life.

—— Jane Shilling , Sunday Telegraph

Through the Window is a wonderful and very interesting collection of essays that rewards close, and also measured, reading.

—— Brendan Wright , Nudge

A masterclass display of versatility... mood and style in these richly concise, crisply written pieces are confidently varied, too... adding vitality to the virtuosity is a terrific ear for idiomatic speech

—— Peter Kemp , Sunday Times

A writer who reveals the power of the short story to speak for our time

—— Irish Times

O’Connor is a gifted storyteller… [He] has a wonderful ear for dialogue and is a master of the telling phrase

—— Brian Maye , Irish Times

This collection is beautiful; full of pure, simple truths that linger long in the mind

—— Philip Womack , New Humanist

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