How It Ended

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

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.