SHORT STORIES: Five Decades

Can any other writer match Irwin Shaw's knack for keeping consistent quality and commercial success compatible? Here, for example, are 63 stories that he has written since 1938 (when not turning out novels, plays, and screenplays), and though many of them were fashioned for big-money magazines like Redbook, hardly any of them smack of hackwork. Through the wide variety of time and place--wartime and peace time, America and Europe, working folk and jet-setters, college kids and alcoholics--the Shaw trademarks are always visible: ear-perfect dialogue, social consciousness (sometimes necessitating a bit of contrived plot-tinkering), ironic twists, violent confrontations, unfailing earthiness. (Most of these stories have appeared before in collections since 1940: Sailor Off the Bremen, Welcome to the City, Act of Faith, In the French Style, Love on a Dark Street, Tip on a Dead Jockey, and God Was Here But He Left Early.)