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How It Ended

New and Collected Stories

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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.

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY author Jay McInerney offers this compelling collection of 26 short stories, which bring listeners on a journey across America. The stories examine moments in the lives of struggling couples, emotionally wrought individuals, and others. 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. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 26, 2009
      These 26 stories—some new, some previously published—go back as many years and take readers to a time when the stock market was bullish and a young writer made his name with an ingeniously packaged first novel that perfectly captured a brief moment in time. In this collection, we become reacquainted with the nameless night-crawling narrator of Bright Lights, Big City
      ; with Alison Poole, the party girl of Story of My Life
      (and who McInerney has said was based on John Edwards’s former mistress Rielle Hunter); and Collin McNab, a would-be screenwriter who enjoys a tortuous relationship with his model girlfriend. We also meet new characters, among them a novice screenwriter who learns to play the Hollywood game a little too well, a woman who contemplates sleeping with an old flame on the eve of his wedding, and, in the title story, a drug dealer whose good luck streak repulses the lawyer to whom he confides his tale. While nobody can channel urban strivers and their shallow pursuits as well as McInerney, after a while, the stories all tend to blur together with a depressing predictability.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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