Collected Fiction: The Young Lions, Bread Upon the Waters, Short Stories: Five Decades, and The Troubled Air

This collection brings together four works by O. Henry Award–winning author Irwin Shaw. The Young Lions is Shaw's New York Times–bestselling debut novel, widely considered one of the four great World War II novels alongside From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny. The novel follows three ordinary soldiers—a Nazi sergeant, a Jewish American infantryman, and an idealistic New York City urbanite—presenting the reality of war through their eyes. Bread Upon the Waters examines a family's encounter with unexpected fortune. The Strands are content despite financial struggles, but when their daughter helps a mugging victim who turns out to be a wealthy Wall Street lawyer, his escalating rewards gradually distance the family from the happiness they originally possessed. Also included are sixty-three short stories that appeared regularly in the New Yorker and Esquire over more than fifty years, featuring works such as "The Eighty-Yard Run" and "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses." The Troubled Air depicts five employees of a popular radio show accused of being Communists. The show's host must decide whether to fire them to preserve his program, facing a choice with no clean outcome during the height of McCarthyism.