Each story traces the progress of a doomed love triangle, and each could almost stand alone as a novella.
Rapture's 51 poems chart the progress of a single passionate love affair, from its delirious beginning – "Falling in love is glamorous hell / The crouched parched heart like a tiger ready to kill / A flame's fierce licks under the skin" – to its desolate end: "All day slow funerals have ploughed the rain / We've done again that trick we have of turning love to pain".
Based on a Bavarian kids' book, Gloria follows the progress of a lonely pig looking for love, saved from the clutches of a butcher and his sausage machine by a boar called Rodney.
Because these moments of being – the fizzling out of a love affair, progress in a career, the pain of losing a child, the sudden certainty of death approaching – stand at the core of each episode, each part also succeeds as a standalone drama, and can be listened to out of sequence.
Alice Munro, one of the foremost short-story writers of her generation, creates tales that have the scope and amplitude of novels: whole lives are condensed into a handful of pages, the progress of love is charted over the years as passion gives way to restlessness or deeper commitment or something more ambiguous.
The progress of a young New York woman through the terrain of sex and love.
The series tracks, it seems, nothing less than the progress of love during the last desperate yet wonderfully productive period of van Gogh's abbreviated life.
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE: My affection for the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro goes beyond the literary, I'm not ashamed to admit, to the unabashedly sentimental and nostalgic.
Darrieux and De Sica can't stop, but the musicians at the side of the room have had enough; they shrug into overcoats and leave, pausing only to light their cigars or snuff the candles that have illuminated the progress of love.
