Shaken and Stirred

Shaken and Stirred is an enticing literary cocktail of stories about drinking and making merry by great writers from the past two centuries.
           
In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppances at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, Clarice Lispector, Joy Williams, Penelope Lively, and many more.

The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a café in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties, and the occasional jail cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, bartenders and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers waking with hangovers. Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred.O. Henry, “The Lost Blend” 
Charles Jackson, from The Lost Weekend
Dorothy Parker, “You Were Perfectly Fine”
Mark Twain, “The Story of the Old Ram”
Kingsley Amis, from Lucky Jim
Roald Dahl, “Taste”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
Damon Runyon, “Lillian”
Jack London, from John Barleycorn
Frank O’Connor, “The Drunkard”
Alice Munro, “An Ounce of Cure”
Sherwood Anderson, “Drink”
Doris Lessing, “Wine”
Guy de Maupassant, “Indiscretion”
Colette, “Clouk’s Fling”
Penelope Lively, “Party”
Charles Dickens, “A Bachelor’s Party”
Dawn Powell, “Dinner on the Rocks”
P. G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest”
Jean Rhys, “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”
Samuel Beckett, “Ding-Dong”
Joy Williams, “Craving”  
Vladimir Nabokov, “Details of a Sunset”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl”
Clarice Lispector, “Daydreams and Drunkenness of a Young Lady”
John Cheever, “The Swimmer”
Robert Coover, “Going for a Beer”
 Diana Secker Tesdell is the editor of the Everyman's Pocket Classic anthologies Christmas Stories, Love Stories, Dog Stories, Cat Stories, Horse Stories, New York Stories, Bedtime Stories, Stories of Art and Artists, Stories of Fatherhood, Stories of Motherhood, Stories of the Sea, and Stories from the Kitchen, and of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet Lullabies and Poems for Children.