Liars in Love was published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1981, nearly two decades after Eleven Kinds of Loneliness had established Yates as a master of the American short story. Where the first collection catalogued the varieties of isolation, the second focuses more narrowly on romantic relationships — and specifically on the lies that people tell themselves and each other in the name of love.
The Collection
The seven stories are longer and more complex than those in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness — novellas rather than stories, in several cases — and they share a preoccupation with expatriate experience. Many are set in London or Paris, drawing on Yates’s own periods abroad, and they capture the specific loneliness of Americans living in Europe: cut off from their familiar contexts, performing identities that don’t quite fit, conducting relationships in a foreign register.
“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” — Perhaps Yates’s finest single story. A young boy observes his mother’s attempt to sculpt a bust of Franklin Roosevelt during the 1933 presidential campaign. The mother is a failed artist, a fantasist, and a loving but unreliable parent. The story’s devastating power comes from its child narrator’s inability to fully understand what he is seeing — and from the reader’s recognition that the mother’s self-deceptions, which seem charming in the 1930s sections, will calcify into the bitterness and alcoholism of the postwar years.
“A Natural Girl” — An American writer in London conducts an affair with a young working-class woman, convincing himself that the relationship is honest and equal while the reader sees clearly that it is exploitative and self-serving.
“Trying Out for the Race” — A boy at a boarding school attempts to make the cross-country team, failing repeatedly. The story uses athletic competition as a metaphor for the more fundamental failure of measuring up — to expectations, to peers, to one’s own self-image.
“Saying Goodbye to Sally” — An American in London ends an affair with characteristic Yatesian ineptitude — unable to be honest, unable to be kind, unable to leave cleanly. The gap between what the narrator believes about himself (sensitive, decent, honest) and what his actions reveal (selfish, cowardly, self-deceiving) is the story’s entire subject.
Yates’s Late Style
The stories in Liars in Love represent Yates at his most technically accomplished. The prose is sparer than in his early work — every sentence carries weight, every detail is precisely chosen, every scene is constructed to reveal character through action rather than commentary. The influence of Chekhov (always present in Yates) is more visible here than anywhere else in his work: the stories create their effects through accumulation and implication rather than dramatic confrontation.
The “liars” of the title are not malicious deceivers. They are people who cannot face the truth about themselves and who construct elaborate narratives to justify their behavior. The lies are ordinary — “I’m a good person,” “this relationship is meaningful,” “I’m going to write that novel” — and their ordinariness is what makes them universal and devastating.
Publication and Reception
The first edition was published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, in 1981. First printings are identified by:
- Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence imprint on title page
- First printing indicators on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
Reviews were strong — critics recognized the collection’s technical mastery and emotional depth — but sales were negligible. By 1981, Yates was essentially invisible to the reading public, his books routinely going out of print within months of publication.
Collecting Liars in Love
First edition (Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1981): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $150–$400. The small first printing and Yates’s subsequent rediscovery have made this a genuinely scarce title in fine condition.
Signed copies are very rare. Yates made few public appearances in the early 1980s. Authenticated signed copies bring $500–$1,500.
Liars in Love benefits from containing “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” — widely anthologised and considered one of the great American stories — and from the overall Yates revival. It is less sought than Eleven Kinds of Loneliness but increasingly valued by collectors who recognise it as the work of a master at the peak of his craft.