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

The Young Lions: Irwin Shaw's New York Times–bestselling debut is widely considered one of the four great World War II novels, along with From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny. Ambitious in its scope and robust in its prose, this "masterpiece" is also deeply humanistic, presenting the reality of war as seen through the eyes of three ordinary soldiers: a Nazi sergeant, a Jewish American infantryman, and an idealistic urbanite from New York City ( The Boston Globe).

Bread Upon the Waters: No good deed goes unpunished? The Strands are a happy family, though not without their financial struggles. When their daughter helps a mugging victim by bringing him home, he turns out to be a Wall Street lawyer whose gratitude is as boundless as his bank account. But with each successive "reward," the Strand family moves farther away from the wealth of happiness they already possessed.

Shaw's prolific output of short stories appeared regularly in the pages of the New Yorker and Esquire for over half a century. These sixty-three stories include such iconic works as "The Eighty-Yard Run" and "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses."

The Troubled Air: Five employees of Clement Archer's popular radio show are accused Communists. He will have to fire them to keep his show on the air. But it's not a simple choice—whatever Archer decides, he won't be able to keep his hands clean, in Shaw's provocative classic about courage and morality at the height of McCarthyism.

"Shaw remains a genial, seductive storyteller, especially adept with money matters and comfy milieus." — Kirkus Reviews