it feels.
On the other hand, at the risk of contradicting myself, I have always been more than a little daunted by the short story. Whereas even a medium-sized novel—let alone the kind Henry James described as a loose baggy monster—can survive any number of false turns, boring characters and off-key sentences, the story is far less forgiving. A good one requires perfect pitch and a precise sense of form; it has to burn with a hard, gemlike flame.
“Smoke” was written in 1985, shortly after the publication of Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first outing for Russell and Corrine Calloway, who have reappeared in Brightness Falls and The Good Life. In between novels I have continued to write stories, seven of which were published in hardcover in 1999 along with the short novel Model Behavior, but since they did not appear in the paperback edition I have included them here: “Smoke,” “The Business,” “How It Ended,” “Getting in Touch with Lonnie,” “Reunion,” “The Queen and I” and “Con Doctor.”
It's strange how the retrospective view highlights the temporal signature of certain stories. “My Public Service,” which I somehow forgot to include in Model Behavior, was written in 1992, years before Monica Lewinsky became a household name. “The Queen and I” was written at about the same time, when the Meatpacking District was still the center of the industry for which it was named by day, and by night devoted to another kind of meat altogether and populated largely by transsexual streetwalkers and their cruising johns. Those familiar with its current incarnation as Manhattan's glossiest hub of platinum-card nightlife might have a hard time recognizing it here. And speaking of change—I saw no reason not to tinker with these older stories when I thought they might be improved. Nor did I feel compelled to resurrect several stories which seemed, on reflection, to resemble sleeping dogs.
The twelve most recent stories, including “Sleeping with Pigs,” “Invisible Fences,” “I Love You, Honey,” “Summary Judgment,” “The Madonna of Turkey Season,” “The Waiter,” “Everything Is Lost,” “The Debutante's Return” and “Putting Daisy Down,” were composed in something of a sprint from December 2007 through the late spring of 2008. “Penelope on the Pond,” which features Alison Poole, the protagonist of my 1988 novel Story of My Life, was also written during this period. (Alison has enjoyed an interesting career as a fictional character: Bret Easton Ellis borrowed her for American Psycho, where she narrowly avoids getting murdered by Patrick Bateman, and she subsequently assumed a prominent role in his novel Glamorama. Moreover, the woman who inspired this character has recently achieved a certain real-life notoriety, but that's a factual matter which needn't further concern us here.) Corrine Calloway returns in “The March,” which I wrote while I was working on The Good Life. And the most recent story here, “The Last Bachelor,” was finished in May of 2008, though the first few paragraphs were written in the early nineties and then set aside.
As different as these twenty-six stories—written over the last twenty-six years—might be, certain preoccupations and obsessions seem to have endured. But enough of these damn facts. I enjoyed writing these stories, and hope you enjoy reading them.
Jay McInerney
August 2008
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It's probably impossible to acknowledge all of those who have helped inspire, improve and meddle with these stories, written over a span of twenty-six years. Still, it would be ungrateful not to try. Special thanks to George Plimpton for saving me from law school by publishing my first short story, and to Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff for reading and commenting on numerous unpublished narratives that preceded it. Bill Buford, as editor at Granta and later The New Yorker, helped shape and polish several of these stories. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to Rust Hills, who nurtured and published many installments of my fiction during his tenure at Esquire, and to Alice Turner, former fiction editor at Playboy. Mona Simpson, Bob O'Connor, Donna Tartt, Julian Barnes, Helen Bransford, Terry McDonell, Bret Easton Ellis, Virginia O'Brien, Jon Robin Baitz and Anne Hearst McInerney are among the early readers who have helped to improve these stories. And I feel very lucky and blessed to have had Binky Urban as a reader and an adviser since the start of my career. Finally, Gary Fisketjon has been my closest reader for thirty years, since we were classmates at Williams College. I showed him my earliest stories not long after we exchanged blows in the name of a