Writing with equal insight about New York City, Hollywood, andthe small-town Pennsylvania world where he grew up, JohnO Hara cultivated an unsentimental and often unsparing realism, aiming, he said, to record the way people talked and thoughtand felt . . . with complete honesty. Praised by contemporariesincluding Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker, he wroteabout sex, drinking, and social class with a frankness ahead of itstime. The fiction he published in The New Yorker (more than anyother writer to this day) came to epitomize the kind of shortstory featured in that magazine, and his impeccable ear andskillful dialogue have influenced later writers such as RaymondCarver. Bringing together sixty stories written over fourdecades the largest, most comprehensive collection of O Hara sstories ever published former New York Times Book Revieweditor Charles McGrath presents a fresh and arresting newperspective on one of American literature s master storytellers."