Jay McInerney: 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:

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17).

If Hemingway was influential, O’Connor was inimitable. She writes like an Old Testament prophet transplanted to South Georgia. The atmospherics are hot and humid, but her vision is ice-cold, the violence leavened with black humor and occasional glimpses of grace.

Read about the other five books on McInerney's list.

--Marshal Zeringue