How It Ended: New and Collected Stories

From the writer whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, defined a generation comes a collection of stories drawn from his nearly three-decade career. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York, or the South, they unveil the manic flux of our society as they capture various stages of adulthood: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her boyfriend campaigns for the highest office; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line; a doctor who treats convicts and is coming to terms with his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss; and more. A manifold exploration of delusion, experience, and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer at the very top of his form.

About the Author :
Jay McInerney is the author of seven novels and two collections of essays on wine. He is a regular contributor to New York magazine, Guardian Weekly (London), and Corriere della Sera. Ray Porter is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and fifteen-year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in numerous films and television shows, including Almost Famous, ER, and Frasier.

Review :
"How It Ended reminds us how impressively broad McInerney's scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our national experience...McInerney's contribution--and it is a major one--is to have revitalized the Irish Catholic expiatory tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara...McInerney's gifts have never been in question. He possesses the literary naturalist's full tool kit: empathy and curiosity, a peeled eye and a well-tuned ear, a talent for building narratives at once intimate and expansive, plausible and inventive." -- "New York Times Book Review (front page)" "[McInerney's] best writing to date, combining a quiet household realism with his gift for pinpointing moments of awkward bafflement." -- "Times Literary Supplement" "[McInerney's] stories have grown more elegant, subtle, shapely and reflective over time, to the point where some of the recent works are perfect specimens." -- "New York Times" "[McInerney] has the storyteller's gift of making the familiar seem strange, of casting new light on old ground. The results are funny, shocking, and moving." -- "Sunday Telegraph" "A splendid short-story writer, [McInerney's] stories are reminiscent of those of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, and Irwin Shaw...A very compelling collection." -- "Booklist (starred review)" "Despite the sexual mayhem in McInerney's stories, a stubborn moral reckoning hovers over the writing...[His] openings hook and reel in the reader with a catchy first line [and] the narration moves speedily over familiar territory with the economy of Raymond Carver and the breathless pace of Stephen Dixon. With language this precise, McInerney possesses the skill to be invisible: he refuse to draw the reader's attention to himself but instead to the stories." -- "Financial Times" "Narrator Ray Porter blends sarcasm, wit, unfiltered emotion, and compassion to create a series of tales so realistic and believable they ring true from start to finish. McInerney's knack for recreating the reality that surrounds us everyday is a perfect fit for Porter's performance ability. Together they craft stories that reveal the underbelly of society while never failing to entertain." -- "AudioFile" "Nobody can channel urban strivers and their shallow pursuits as well as McInerney." -- "Publishers Weekly" "Proof that McInerney's star burns as bright as ever." -- "Vanity Fair" "The short story is the perfect measure for [McInerney's] brand of beautifully distilled prose and dry sophistication." -- "Independent on Sunday" "Whether it was Edith Wharton at the turn of the 20th century or John Cheever in the 1950s and '60s, New York City has never lacked for chroniclers of its mores. Perhaps a century from now, cultural historians will plump the works of Jay McInerney to discern what life was like there in the two decades between the explosion of Wall Street wealth and the grim aftermath of 9/11. His keen-eyed depiction of that period is generously displayed in How it Ended...his dark depiction of a slice of modern American life that may be passing away in front of our eyes, as the title of this volume ironically suggests, is no less perceptive and real." -- "Bookpage"