‘Reunion’ by John Cheever, as read by Richard Ford on The New Yorker podcast

I love Ford’s reading of this; his tone is fittingly impassive and resigned, and yet you can hear the narrator’s enormous vulnerability. The story is about the car crash that is his father, crashing increasingly hard in the bars of New York. It’s funny throughout and desolating afterwards…

“Kellner! Garçon! Cameriere! You!”

First published in The New Yorker, October 1962, and collected in The Stories of John Cheever, Knopf, 1978