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Themed round the allure of alcohol, these 27 short stories range from the grisly to the completely hilarious and are a wonderful read. Dorothy Parker's "You were perfectly fine" shows a young woman reassuring her boyfriend that he didn't make a complete fool of himself when paralytically drunk, culminating in her expressions of delight at his marriage proposal and leaving the reader, together with the young man himself, to guess whether the proposal really happened. Edgar Allen Poe's classic story "The Cask of Amontillado" is a dark and horrific tale of revenge. An extract from Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim depicts the scene where Jim is the weekend guest of his boss and is appalled to wake up surrounded by burnt sheets, deducing that he must have fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. Samuel Beckett's "Ding Dong" is the tale of his friend Belacqua's progress through the watering holes of Dublin, culminating in his extraordinary encounter with a mesmerising female beggar in purple. "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" by P. G. Wodehouse shows the Master Fixer in superb form, getting rid of Aunt Agatha's embarrassing son Motty and doing a deal with Bertie regarding a regrettably pink tie. 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. Other writers include Charles Dickens, Alice Munro, Penelope Lively, Doris Lessing, Damon Runyon, Roald Dahl, and every story is a gem. 393pp, Everyman Pocket Classic. Remainder mark.