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; innocents overimbibe in tales
by Jack London and Alice Munro; 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.