Friday, April 17, 2009

Jay McInerney's favorite story collections

Jay McInerney is the author of Bright Lights, Big City and other books. His How It Ended, a volume of new and collected short stories, has just been published.

He named his favorite story collections for The Week. One title on the list:
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver (Vintage, $15).

Carver’s first collection, with its pared-down, colloquial language and its working-class settings, almost single-handedly revivified realism, and the short story itself, when it appeared in 1976. It remains astonishingly fresh and powerful to this day. Like Hemingway, Carver stripped away the cobwebs and taught us a new way to see and hear the world around us.
Read about another book on McInerney's list.

--Marshal Zeringue