Title: The New York Stories <>Binding: Paperback <>Author: JohnO'Hara <>Publisher: PenguinBooks
"You can binge on his collections, the way some people binge on
Mad Men, and for some of the same reasons."
--Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review "Don Draper is an O'Hara character if ever there was one. . . . The stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting. . . . You're aware of how brilliantly O'Hara uses dialogue to convey exposition, and of how often his people, like Hemingway's, leave unsaid what is really on their minds. . . . O'Hara [was] a master of the short story . . . The New York anthology . . . is part of a welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback."
--Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review "An author I love is John O'Hara. . . . I think he's been forgotten by time, but for dialogue lovers, he's a goldmine of inspiration." --
Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness "Among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language... [He helped] to invent what the world came to call
The New Yorker short story."
--Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker "O'Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature.... He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust."
--Lionel Trilling, The New York Times "This is fiction, but it has, for me, the clang of truth."
--John Updike "O'Hara's eyes and ears have been spared nothing."
--Dorothy Parker "A writer of dream-sharp tales, crisp yet dense."
--Los Angeles Times "O'Hara practices the classic form of the modern short story developed by Joyce and perfected by Hemingway. . . . His coverage is worthy of a Balzac."
--E. L. Doctorow, from the Foreword "Superb . . . The 32 stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons. . . . Undoubtedly, between the 1930s and the 1970s, [O'Hara] was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of midcentury society. . . . What elevates O'Hara above slice-of-life portraitists like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner is the turmoil glimpsed beneath the vibrant surfaces." --
The Wall Street Journal "His short stories are gorgeous broken scenes of American life . . . and his style and themes--a bridge, if you will, between F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike--remain painfully and beautifully relevant today."
--Huffington Post