Liars in Love (1981) Signed First Edition Reference

Liars in Love is Richard Yates’s second story collection, published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1981, nearly two decades after Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. The seven stories — all long, all autobiographically rooted — represent Yates at his most technically accomplished and emotionally relentless. The collection’s title itself captures Yates’s central preoccupation: the lies people tell in the name of love, and the damage those lies inflict.

The Collection

The stories draw heavily on Yates’s own experiences: failed marriages, alcoholism, the writer’s life in New York and Hollywood, the damage passed from parents to children. “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” — about a boy’s experience of his mother’s delusional attempt to sculpt a bust of Franklin Roosevelt — is widely regarded as one of the finest American short stories of the postwar period. “Saying Goodbye to Sally” and “A Natural Girl” explore the failure of romantic love with a precision that makes most fiction about relationships seem sentimental.

The stories are uniformly long — most run twenty to thirty pages — and they share the unhurried, accumulative rhythm that characterizes Yates’s best work. Each story builds its case with patient, devastating specificity, and each ends with the recognition that the characters’ self-deceptions, however understandable, have cost them dearly.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, New York Publication date: 1981 Copyright page: First printing per Delacorte convention First printing: Very small — story collections by literary fiction authors in 1981 had minimal commercial potential

Signed Copy Market

• Signed first edition: Very scarce
• Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
• Unsigned first edition, very good: $75–$200

Story collections generally command lower prices than novels in the first-edition market, and Liars in Love follows this pattern relative to Yates’s novels. The scarcity premium for signed copies, however, applies fully — any authenticated signed Yates title is valuable.

Collecting Position

Liars in Love occupies an important position for serious Yates collectors. The story “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” alone would justify the collection’s existence, and the other stories are nearly as strong. For collectors who value Yates as a short story writer — and many critics consider him the finest American short story writer of his generation — this is an essential title, paired with Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as the two pillars of his achievement in the form.