Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories — Diana Secker Tesdell

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.