Smoke

by Jay McInerney

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection That summer in New York, everyone was wearing yellow ties; the stock market was coming into a long bull run; and Corrine and Russell Calloway quit smoking.    From the writer whose Bright Lights, Big City defined a generation and the city of New the taut, darkly funny, alternately sultry and wistful story of the Calloway clan, who also appear in The Good Life and Brightness Falls. A selection from How It Ended, a career-spanning collection of McInerney’s short fiction, which show him to be a master of the genre, “brim[ming] with all the attendant guilt and thrills and self-defeating impulses of an extramarital tryst . . . Brilliant” (The Boston Globe).   An eBook short.

34 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 9, 2015

About the author

John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He is the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled The Good Life, published in 2006.